The paper gives an overview of recent developments in Sweden concerning the communication and reception of the Open Access concept and the growth and co-ordination of digital academic repositories. The Open Access concept was primarily introduced in Sweden from library circles which also coloured the arguments used. University leaders started to show an interest from 2002 and their association, the SUHF, issued a report favorable to Open Access in 2003. In the consecutive years both the SUHF and the Swedish Research Council signed the Berlin declaration. The relatively swift change of policy towards a support of Open Access by these two important stakeholders was obviously influenced by the international discussion but also by the way the issue was raised in Sweden and by the absence of a national publisher lobby arguing against Open Access. The development of e-publishing within Swedish higher education started to gather momentum in the years following 2000. Universities either chose to particicipate in the DiVA consortium or to implement available Open Source software. In 2003 the national SVEP project was launched to co-ordinate and scale up the development of e-publishing within higher education. Recommendations were issued for metadata descriptions of e-publications, for publication databases and for subject categories. The SUHF gave support to the metadata recommendations for publication databases (local registers of academic publications) which clears the way for a co-ordination between publication databases and freely available full-text material in repositories. Important building blocks of a generalized archiving workflow between a local repository and a national archive were implemented. A resolution service for the use of permanent identifiers and a service for administrating name spaces in URN:NBN were established. A national search service for undergraduate theses was developped and put into operation at the LIBRIS website. The service uses the OAI-PMH to harvest local repositories who have to implement a metada model based on simple Dublin Core. A new development programme to support Open Access in Sweden is now being initiated. It will engage the major stakeholders in Sweden and will have a clear focus on promoting the growth of the volume and diversity of content in academic repositories.