New policy paper on access to publicly funded research

"Published research outputs often end up locked behind paywalls, unavailable to many researchers and the broader public, impeding scientific – and human – progress. Despite progress in the area of open science, research funded by the European public is no exception to this. In many cases, European taxpayers are essentially asked to pay up twice, once for funding the research and again for access to the final publication. One reason for this is the transfer of copyright ownership. To comply with contractual demands, researchers routinely outright transfer their economic exploitation rights to publishers, or fail to retain sufficient rights that would allow them or their funders to republish or reuse their work. This contradicts the primary goal of research, which is to maximise its impact by sharing it as widely as possible in a timely manner.

Today, COMMUNIA is releasing Policy Paper #17 on access to publicly funded research (also available as a PDF file), in which we propose a targeted intervention in European copyright law to improve access to publicly funded research..."