Open Access for all

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23 november 2015 | The European Universities Association is developing “a roadmap to assist European universities in the transition to Open Access.” EUA wants to be proactive here, beacuse “Open Access is high on political agendas both at national and EU level, and universities need to be actively involved in these policy processes.”

The roadmap comes at a time when the importance of Open Access both for the scientific community and policy makers is increasing. This initiative is in line with other EU level initiatives in the area of Open Access, for example the recent statements made by Commissioner Carlos Moedas and  Dutch Secretary of State Sander Dekker calling on scientific publishers to make their business models for open access publishing fairer and fully transparent.

Fostering structured dialogue

This follows up on a recommendation made by EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science. The roadmap  will focus on, inter alia, access and use of research publications and research data; intellectual property rights and copyright policies; development of European Open Access policies; promoting advanced scientific recognition systems and fostering structured dialogue among all relevant stakeholders. The intention is to publish the roadmap in early 2016.

The EUA says, that this will build on past and current EUA activities, namely the recommendations on Open Access (2008), the briefing paper on Open Access to research publications (2014) and EUA’s Open Access checklist for universities (2015). The roadmap will also take account of the outcomes of a survey EUA is currently conducting on the degree of implementation of institutional policies on Open Access.