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"Open Access - presentation

An important aspect of Open Science is a move towards open access to research results funded with public money. Facilitating access to those results encourages the re-use of research output. Science and research have always been open, but some of the processes for producing research and disseminating its results are not.

It is now widely recognised that making research results more accessible to all societal actors contributes to better and more efficient science, and to innovation in the public and private sectors. In 2012, the European Commission published a Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information encouraging all EU Member States to put publicly-funded research results in the public domain in order to strengthen science and the knowledge-based economy.

This global shift towards giving free, online access (open access) to the results of publicly-funded research has been a core strategy of the European Commission to improve knowledge circulation and thus innovation. It is illustrated by the general principle of open access to scientific publications in Horizon 2020 and the Open Research Data Pilot.

You can follow the developments of open access at the European Commission in more detail on Twitter (@OpenAccessEC) and on the website for the Digital Single Market."