Council calls for transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications

On 23 May, the Council of the EU adopted a groundbreaking set of conclusions advocating high-quality, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing in which it calls for immediate and unrestricted open access in publishing research involving public funds. The move drew widespread support from Europe’s academic community, including in a joint response from nine organisations representing funders, researchers and universities.

The EU Council stressed the importance of open science and its potential to improve the quality and impact of research. This builds on previous conclusions that similarly highlighted research integrity, the concept of Open Science and international cooperation in research and innovation.

The document stresses the need to accelerate the transition to Open Science and to promote the availability, diversity and reproducibility of research results. It stresses that open access to scientific publications should be the norm for publicly funded research. It also calls for support for non-profit Open Access publishing models that do not charge fees to authors or readers. It seeks to avoid a situation where researchers’ choice of publication channels is constrained more by financial capacity rather than quality criteria.

The Competitiveness Council encourages Member States and the European Commission to support the development of Open Access, to explore measures to remove barriers to access and re-use of publicly funded research results and to update national Open Access principles. It also stresses the need for a change in research culture, monitoring progress towards Open Science and investment in infrastructure and skills. One of the challenges for Member States is to support the Open Research Europe pilot programme, which is intended to serve as a publication service for open access outputs from research.

The Competitiveness Council conclusions can be found here.