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EU Council Calls for ‘Immediate’ Open Access to all Scientific Papers by 2020
The Council of the European Union [europa.eu] is one of the two chambers of the EU's legislative branch [wikipedia.org]. One of its multiple responsibilities [europa.eu] is to coordinate member states' policies by brokering compromises between the member states. The Council is composed of 10 specialized Council configurations where each configuration deals with a distinct policy area. Every six months a different member state holds the Presidency of the Council. The Council configurations meet regularly, and one of the advantages of holding the presidency is that the presiding member state draws up the agenda for the Council and chairs all meetings, and ministers from the presiding member state chair the Council configuration meetings.
The current six-month presidency term is held by the Netherlands. One of the many positions [eu2016.nl] important to them is Open Science [eu2016.nl].
As part of the most recent meeting [europa.eu] of the Competitiveness Council, they announced an agreement on an ambitious new open access (OA) target whereby all scientific papers should be freely available by 2020 [eu2016.nl]. What makes this particularly challenging is that even the Netherlands, who is leading this charge and was heading down this path independently, were planning to achieve OA by 2024 [www.nwo.nl]. As expected, there are plenty of details to be worked out [sciencemag.org]:
The council's statement is also slightly ambiguous on what exactly should be accomplished by 2020. It calls for "immediate" OA, "without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes." Many non-OA journals currently allow authors to make their papers available—for instance in an institutional repository—6 or 12 months after publication, but the essence of immediate OA is that a paper is freely available when it gets published. How short journal-imposed embargoes would have to become to qualify as "immediate" OA remains unclear. Harnad says the deposit in an institutional repository should be "immediately upon acceptance for publication (because if the 2019 scientific article output is deposited in 2021, that is not OA in 2020)."
