The European Union is set to throw the weight of its 64 billion ($102 billion) research funding program behind open-access publishing, Times Higher Education has learned. See full article at http://bit.ly/JRcpha – excerpts below.
An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 program, said that for researchers receiving funding from its program between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing “will be the norm.” A pilot under way in seven areas of its current funding program will be extended to become a mandate across all peer-reviewed research in the new scheme, which will cover fields ranging from particle physics to social science.
The organization is still negotiating with publishers and working up the details of the proposal, but it plans to put forward further ideas at an event in Brussels on June 20 and to publish an official policy before the summer. Speaking to Times Higher Education, the director general of research and innovation at the commission, Robert-Jan Smits, said its commitment to free online access was essential to driving free movement of researchers and ideas within Europe.
Although the commission is keeping the exact requirements under wraps, the pilot that will shape the eventual scheme used both gold and green models of open access. During the pilot, the commission underwrote the costs that publishers charged authors to publish their work freely, known as the gold model, but only for the duration of the project. It also explored the green model, in which holders of European Research Council grants were required to make their publications available in open-access repositories within six months of publication, while other grant holders had to do so after 6 to 12 months.
