Statement on scientific publications by three national Academies (Academie des sciences, Leopoldina and Royal Society)

"4 -Openarchives Pre-publication reviewing is important to control the quality of articles. However, open archives and preprint repositories also have a valuable role in allowing the rapid dissemination of scientific work and encouraging large scale, post-publication peer review by the entire community. To minimize delays in the dissemination of scientific work, articles should be deposited in open access repositories (also known as preprint servers). There are a number of established systems, including arXiv (for the physical sciences and mathematics) and bioRxiv (for the biological sciences). Such a deposit should not be considered a hindrance to the acceptance of an article by a journal and journals should make their policies clear on this matter. Significant effort should be made to improve the visibility of articles that have been deposited in open archives and which until now have not been taken into account by the main alerting services (for example Web of Science, Pubmed and Scopus).

5 -OpenAccess We support the principles of open access and would like to see all published scientific work freely available under fully open licenses as soon as possible at sustainable publication costs for the scientific community. We support both "green" and "gold" routes to open access and believe that the funds currently spent on journal subscriptions should be re-directed to fund publication charges. Ultimately, we believe that the "gold" open access publication route is likely to be the most sustainable option for open access journals, but that the payment of an article processing charge must be clearly separated from the editorial decision. We would like to see science publishing move away from large corporate interests and a stronger involvement of academies and learned societies in order that any surplus funds may be used for the benefit of science. At the same time, authors should always retain their intellectual property rights...."