European science funders ban grantees from publishing in paywalled journals | Science | AAAS

The announcement delighted many OA advocates. "This will put increased pressure on publishers and on the consciousness of individual researchers that an ecosystem change is possible," says Ralf Schimmer, head of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich. Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, calls the plan "admirably strong." Many other funders support OA, but only the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation applies similarly stringent requirements for “immediate OA,” Suber says. The European Commission and the European Research Council support the plan; although they haven't adopted similar requirements for the research they fund, a statement by E.U. Commisisoner Carlos Moedas suggests they may do so in the future and urges the European Parliament and the European Council to support the approach.

But traditional publishers are not pleased. The plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system," a spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3000 journals, wrote in an email to ScienceInsider. "Implementing such a plan, in our view, would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom," adds a spokesperson for AAAS, Science's publisher. "It would also be unsustainable for the Science family of journals." The world's biggest academic publisher, Elsevier, declined to comment, referring instead to a statement by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers that urged "caution" and said "above all, it is vital that researchers have the freedom to publish in the publication outlet of their choice."