Action Plan towards Open Access Publications - Global Research Council

"'Encouragement - Awareness raising -Support for researchers that wish to provide their results in Open Access' Those were the three key points set out in an Action Plan during the annual Global Research Council Summit held in Berlin on 27 - 29 May 2013.  Heads of 70 global science and research councils gathered. Discussions focused in particular on open access.  DFG-President, Professor Peter Strohschneider, stressed the relevance of 'Open Access' to publications as a main paradigm of scientific communication in the following years. Read the Press Release here ... An Action Plan was discussed and the following points were set out: [1] Tackle the perception of open access by publicizing success stories [2] Collect and document best practices for rewarding the provision of open access [3] Organise awareness-raising workshops on open access publishing, especially in developing countries [4] Encourage publishers to further develop open access models [5] Develop an integrated funding stream for hybrid open access [6] Monitor and assess the affordability of open access [7] Work with scholarly societies to transition society journals into open access [8] Supporting self-archiving through funding guidelines and copyright regulations [9] Negotiate publisher services to facilitate deposit in open access repositories [10] Work with publishers to find intelligent billing solutions for the increasing amount of open access articles [11] Work with repository organisations to develop efficient mechanisms for harvesting and ac-cessing information [12] Explore new ways to assess quality and impact of research articles [13] Develop and explore mechanisms to assess the impact of the GRC’s support for open access [14] Periodically review how the implementation of the Action Plan is evolving The proposed activities aim at raising awareness for open access, at promoting and supporting  open access, and at assessing the implementation of the actions suggested. In addition, the action plan is designed to take into account that participants in the GRC come from various backgrounds, have various degrees of expertise in dealing with open access, and have different remits.  For more details on these above points, read the Action Plan here ..."