On the morning of April 3, 2019, Professor Gunnar Sivertsen, researcher and special adviser at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), and director of the Center for Scientometrics and Evaluation, visited our school and presented a lecture entitled “Observations and Considerations in the Transition to Open Access Publishing”. The lecture was hosted by Professor Lin Zhang of our school.

Professor Sivertsen introduced background and reasons of publishing industry's transition from traditional publishing model to open access model at the beginning, and gave a brief description of the development and current status of open access movement. He presented the development and trends of open access publishing model by important landmark events, such as the editor-in-chief and editorial committee of Journal of Informetrics, which is the top journal of metrology academia, resigned en masse and started new Open Access journal, and Plan S program which launched by several European countries jointly.

Subsequently, Professor Sivertsen elaborated the influence of open access publishing model from three different perspectives: scientometrics, scientific research policy and scientific research economy. First of all, from the perspective of scientometrics, the number of open access journals in different countries and different subject areas shows an increasing trend generally. The study also found that the scope of open access journals recorded in the WOS database is very limited, and there are significant differences in the inclusion of open access journals in different disciplines. Therefore, WOS database does not reflect the overall status of open access journals. Secondly, as far as scientific research policies are concerned, if open access adopts author-pays model, it is likely to bring risks and challenges to scientific research quality and integrity. Professor Sivertsen pointed out that these problems could be solved by continuous peer review and other approaches. Thirdly, the open access model has a negative impact on the research economy at present, but these negative effects should be able to become positive after the open access model is fully applied.

As a senior journal management and evaluation expert, Professor Sivertsen was invited to become the editorial board member of Data and Information Management, which is an English journal managed by our school, and he put forward valuable suggestions for the journal's development. He highly praised the positive role of our English journal in the field of open access, and hoped that the English journal team of our school could explore a road to high-quality open access journal.

Gunnar Sivertsen is a professor of Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), director of the Center for Scientometrics and Evaluation. He has served as research evaluation consultant for European Union and several European governments in Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, and etc. and has helped European governments to establish and improve national research information and evaluation systems. His "Norwegian model" evaluation system has been widely used and has far-reaching influence on the scientific evaluation and funding system in many European countries. In recent years, Professor Gunnar Sivertsen has devoted himself to research in many frontier research domains such as national innovation evaluation, humanities and social sciences evaluation, and scientific social impact evaluation, and etc.

  Contributed by: Journal Center

                                                                   Sun Yifan, Ding Nian