Following the conclusion of the DEAL agreements with Wiley, Springer-Nature and, for the first time, Elsevier, the scientific community now has the opportunity to use the time available to it in the coming years to shape the future of Open Access in a sustainable way, says Roland Bertelmann of the Helmholtz Open Science Office.
Science Europe remains committed to contributing to the Coalition and its objectives and will continue to support the global reform of research assessment processes through a variety of activities, as detailed in this Year 1 action plan, which has now been published.
cOAlition S recently published the document “Towards Responsible Publishing”: Towards Responsible Publishing | Plan S (coalition-s.org). With this document, COAlition S would like to start a discussion process around the topic of scholarly communication and invites you to participate in the following feedback survey: “Towards Responsible Publishing”: Early feedback survey (alchemer.eu) . The deadline for the survey is Wednesday, 29 November 2023 at 23:59 CET.
Further information can also be found in the blog post Introducing the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal from cOAlition S | Plan S (coalition-s.org) and in the following article: Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing plan (nature.com).
Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, academic books have not been a focal point for open access policy-makers so far. PALOMERA is an EU-funded project that addresses this challenge. (More information: https://operas-eu.org/projects/palomera/)
This survey is a contribution to an extensive collection of data on the needs, obstacles and challenges of policy-making for open access books. Based on the evidence given by the survey results, PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations for the development of open access book policies on the European, national and institutional level. By taking part in this survey, you are making a contribution to the research needed to speed up the transformation of the book market to open access.
The Council of the European Union has adopted conclusions calling for scientific publishing to be transparent and of high quality, with immediate and unrestricted open access for all.
It also stresses that scientific publishing supports the essential principles of academic freedom and scientific integrity. It particularly ensures maximum accessibility to research results and contributes to their potential re-use. This is why the Council clearly states that open access must become the norm in communicating results from research receiving public funding and concludes that any publication costs should not be paid by individual researchers.
To achieve this, the Council calls on the Commission and the EU Member States to support policies in favour of non-profit, multi-format, open-access scientific publishing models which are free of cost for authors and readers alike.
The Council’s conclusions have received the public support of higher education and research stakeholders – the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, etc.
For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.
Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.