Open access should be the norm for EU by 2020, say research ministers

(credit: Competitiveness Council)

EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” The decision was taken during a meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which is made up of ministers from the EU’s member states. In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.”

The formal “conclusions” of the meeting define open access to publications as “free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.” This is taken from the key Budapest Open Access Initiative that helped to define open access back in 2002—an indication of how slow progress has been so far.

Although the open access commitment by the EU ministers has been hailed as a “major boost” for open science by the League of European Research Universities, it is a political signal, rather than a plan for implementation. The Competitiveness Council is made up of ministers from each of the EU member states, and they have now committed their respective governments to move to open access in the next four years, but there is no legal mechanism to force them to do so.

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