KB has a standing mandate to coordinate, monitor, and promote collaboration in the work to advance open access to scholarly publications. The goal is for scholarly publications that are the result of research financed with public funds to be published with immediate open access.During the transition to an open science system, KB is monitoring and reporting on the investments made, their size, how expenditures are distributed across categories, and how they are allocated among institutions. The annual report, covering the 2024 expenditures for scholarly publishing, has now been submitted to the government.

Decrease in costs for Swedish higher education institutions

Although in 2024 total expenditures for scholarly publishing rose by SEK 7 million from the previous year, the actual costs borne by higher education institutions decreased slightly. This is due to increased engagement and financial contributions from Sweden’s public research funders, who covered approximately 7 per cent of total expenditures during the year. As a result, institutional costs decreased by 1.8 per cent from the previous year.

Over the past five years, total expenditures have increased 13.8 per cent – from SEK 709 million in 2020 to SEK 806 million in 2024. During the same period, the number of open access articles published via Bibsam’s agreements increased by nearly 50 per cent, from around 11,000 to approximately 16,500.

Institutional expenditures for scholarly publishing in 2024 corresponded to approximately 1.5 per cent of the institutions’ total revenue for research and doctoral education. This is the same proportion as in the previous four years. According to the Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet, UKÄ), research funding amounted to SEK 55.2 billion in 2024.

Open infrastructures

A prerequisite for an open science system is robust, scalable, open IT infrastructures that enable the collection, storage, organisation, access to, sharing, and assessment of research. The Swedish national guidelines for open science underscore the importance of open infrastructures and state that they should be funded nationally in a coordinated way. In particular, non-profit open infrastructures should be supported.

In total, institutions spent just under SEK 12 million on open infrastructures in 2024 – an increase of SEK 2 million from the previous year, when this expenditure category was first included in the report.

Open access publications

Expenditures for transformative read-and-publish agreements – through which the majority of open access articles are published – account for 56 per cent of total expenditures. These agreements remain the largest single expense for institutions. The goal of transformative agreements is to redirect payment flows from subscription-based to open access publishing. However, the transition is proceeding slowly – so slowly that there is a risk of these agreements becoming a permanent business model rather than a transitional phase.

To address this risk and further drive the transition to open access, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, SUHF) has established recommendations for navigating the path beyond transformative agreements.