Blinde Offensive: Die EU macht einen Open-Access-Vorstoß

From Google's English:  "Is that what the European fight for academic freedom looks like? The European Commission and eleven European science organizations want to force the researchers they fund to publish only open access from January 2020. Otherwise they face unspecified sanctions. How the changeover can be managed in the hopelessly tight deadline is not revealed. The European alliance does not seem to be bothered by the serious encroachment on academic freedom that the measure entails, but it could soon occupy the constitutional courts.

The European advance will please major scientific powers such as China and the United States, who are to receive all scientific publications from the EU free of charge and do not dream of returning the favor for the kind gift. It will hopefully be explained to them how the European citizens, who will then have free access to scientific publications that the majority do not understand, will benefit from it. Perhaps one should measure the number of Citizen Scientists to see how economical this calculation is.

The European advance seems anachronistic at a time when the downsides of Open Access are becoming more and more apparent. The uproar over predatory publishers has shown the danger emanating from journals that bypass scientific quality assurance. The switch from the subscription model to the author's fee, which goes along with Open Access, made the predatory publishers possible in the first place...."