Stakeholders petition Commission to provide open access to EU funded research
Thousands of scientists and academics have signed a petition calling on the European Commission to support open access to the results of publicly funded research. Organised by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and its European partners, the petition urges the Commission to take the lead in the debate on open access by endorsing recommendations that the Commission made in January 2006. The recommendations were made in a study on the economic and technical evolution of scientific publication markets in Europe. In particular, the petition calls on the Commission to adopt, as a matter of urgency, the study's first recommendation - to establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EU-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives. Any potential 'embargo' on free access should be set at no more than six months following publication, says the petition, as suggested recently by the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) and European Research Council (ERC). 'Research must be widely disseminated and read to be useful. Adopting Recommendation A1 will immediately ensure the widest possible readership for EC-funded research, increasing the potential benefits resulting from the research, and promoting European scholarship both within Europe and beyond,' reads the petition.