News archive - EC pushes open access
In a recent speech entitled ‘Making Open Access a Reality for Science’, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, outlined the EC’s plans to facilitate more timely access to a greater number of scientific articles in Europe. The cornerstone is the Open Data Strategy, which was set out by the EC in December 2011. Kroes noted that the number of scientific articles available via Open access today represents about 20 per cent of the total, but that this is not enough. She also outlined some of the reasons for this; namely publishers continuing to impose restrictive conditions on researchers and a limited number of researchers putting their research papers in an open repository.
Kroes stated that Open Access should not be limited to journal articles, but should also include access to research data. This would enable researchers to “re-analyse experiments; boost the impact of research, and provide a precious fuel for new collaborations and new knowledge-based industries”. She also underlined some of the difficulties involved in strengthening open access; notably the costs, technical complexity, diversity of formats and types for data. Interoperability, meaning datasets and software working with each other, was identified as the key to this. The speech was delivered at the conference of the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project.
Further information
EC press release SPEECH/12/392 is available at: http://europa.eu/rapid
- Europe
- Cross-thematic/Interdisciplinary
Entry created by Elke Dall on July 3, 2012
Modified on July 3, 2012
