This page presents the statistics that the National Library of Sweden regularly compiles as part of its national coordination role for the work with open access to scholarly publications. The data illustrate trends in the publication of open access scholarly articles in Sweden.

Scholarly articles

This section presents data on the development of open access peer-reviewed articles published by Swedish research organisations that provide data to Swepub. The data is sourced from Swepub and enriched with data from Unpaywall External link., a global service that provides information on open access to articles.

The statistics cover articles published from 2020 to 2024. In addition to the total proportion of articles published with immediate open access, the data also breaks down the proportion by three open access categories:

• Gold - articles are published in fully open access journals
• Hybrid - individual articles are published with immediate open access in a subscription-based journal
• Green - a version of the article is made available via a subject or institutional repository, and typically becomes openly accessible 6 to 36 months after publication

Read more about the different categories here.

During the period 2020 to 2024, between 37,000 and 41,000 articles were delivered to Swepub per publication year. Since 2021, the total number of articles has decreased slightly.

The Swedish government's goal is for articles to be open access immediately upon publication. During this period, the proportion of articles that meet this goal (that is, published as gold or hybrid open access) has increased from 58 per cent to 76 per cent. The largest growth has been in hybrid publishing, which has more than doubled during the period.

Research subject areas

The publications in Swepub are classified into research subject areas according to the Swedish Higher Education Authority's (UKÄ's) classification External link.. The proportion of articles published with open access in 2024 in the six main research subject areas is reported below. Publication patterns differ between the different subject areas. In some areas, such as medicine and natural sciences, articles dominate. Other fields, such as those in the humanities, publish significant parts of their research in the form of books or chapters in anthologies.

Universities and higher education institutions

Almost all Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs) report data to Swepub. The diagram below shows the proportion of open access articles published in 2024 for HEIs with more than 30 articles included in the data.