KUNGLIGA BIBLIOTEKET

Their core work

Kungliga Biblioteket is Sweden's national library — the legal depositary of all Swedish publications and the central authority on research information, scholarly communication, and open access policy at the national level. In the European research infrastructure context, they contribute their expertise in tracking open access uptake across Swedish institutions, operating national repository systems, and supplying authoritative bibliometric data to pan-European monitoring frameworks. Their participation in the OpenAIRE program positions them as a trusted national node feeding Swedish publication and compliance data into Europe's open access infrastructure. They are one of roughly 50 national institutions that collectively make up the backbone of European open scholarship monitoring.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their early H2020 participation (2015–2018), the focus was narrowly on monitoring open access outcomes and supporting the gold open access pilot — essentially tracking whether researchers complied with Horizon 2020 open access mandates and feeding that data back into OpenAIRE. By their second project (2018–2021), the vocabulary shifted substantially: open scholarship, open research data, open science observatory, and EOSC entered the picture, reflecting Europe's broadening ambition from access compliance to a full open science ecosystem. The trajectory is clear — from a national data-feeding role in a compliance-focused infrastructure to a contributing node in the European Open Science Cloud.

They are moving in lockstep with the European open science agenda — if EOSC expands into areas like open peer review, open educational resources, or research data certification, they are positioned to follow.

How they like to work

Kungliga Biblioteket has never led an H2020 project — both participations are as a consortium member within the large OpenAIRE network, which typically includes 50+ national institutions. This is consistent with their natural role: a trusted national node contributing data and institutional authority rather than driving technical development. Working with them means engaging a well-coordinated public institution with clear mandates and stable long-term commitments — not a nimble research group that pivots on demand.

Despite only two projects, they have accumulated 65 unique consortium partners across 34 countries — a reflection of OpenAIRE's deliberately pan-European membership spanning virtually all EU member states plus associated countries. Their network is broad geographically but concentrated thematically within the open science and research infrastructure community.

What sets them apart

What sets Kungliga Biblioteket apart from university libraries or research institutes is institutional authority: as the Swedish state's legal depositary, they have formal relationships with every Swedish research institution and legal access to the country's complete publication record — something no university or research centre can replicate. For consortium builders, they provide a credible national gateway into Swedish research output data and a direct line to Swedish open access policy. They carry the weight of a government institution without the bureaucratic unpredictability of a ministry.

Highlights from their portfolio

• OpenAIRE-Advance
  The larger of their two projects at EUR 115,000, this brought them into the EOSC orbit and expanded their scope from compliance monitoring to active open scholarship infrastructure — their most strategically significant H2020 engagement.
• OpenAIRE2020
  Their entry point into pan-European research infrastructure, establishing the national node role that defined all subsequent H2020 activity and connecting them to 65 partners across 34 countries through a single project.