EU and World Bank step up pressure to make research available for free

“Three significant blows were struck this week for the international cause of achieving open access to scientific research. Neelie Kroes (pictured), vice-president of the European Commission, who is responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, has confirmed that the commission is drawing up a proposal to open up access to the results of research funded under its proposed €85 billion (US$111 billion) Horizon 2020 research programme. The World Bank announced that it is to make findings of research that it funds freely available under Creative Commons licensing. And the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest biomedical charities, announced that it will launch its own free online publication to compete with subscription-based journals and enable scientists to make their research findings freely available. Kroes said... ‘We already have the infrastructure supporting open access. Researchers, funding bodies and the public are already using and re-using thousands of publications hosted around the world in e-Infrastructures like OpenAIRE. ‘This is important. Not just because it helps scientists and science to progress. But because we should never forget that the number one research funder in Europe is the taxpayer. And they deserve to get the largest possible reward from that investment.’ Kroes said there was no reason why subscription access only models should remain dominant for access to research publications in an era when distribution costs approach zero. Her speech came a day after the World Bank announced details of its open access policy, which will take effect from 1 July. Two years after opening its vast storehouse of data to the public, the bank is consolidating more than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers in a search-engine friendly Open Knowledge Repository, and allowing the public to distribute, reuse and build upon much of its work – including commercially. The bank says the repository is a one-stop-shop for most of its research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access to students, libraries, government officials and anyone interested in its knowledge. Other material, including foreign language editions and links to datasets, will be added in the coming year. Further, the World Bank will become the first major international organisation to make much of its research output available under Creative Commons licensing. This will mean that any user located anywhere in the world will be able to read, download, save, copy, print, reuse and link to the full text of the bank’s research work, free of charge... The Wellcome Trust, which provides £400 million (US$636 million) a year in funds for research on human and animal health, announced on 10 April that it too would throw its weight behind efforts by scientists to make their work freely available to all. It said it would launch its own free online publication to compete with existing academic journals in an effort to force publishers to increase free access. Currently most scientific journals are only available by subscription. Sir Mark Walport, head of the Wellcome Trust, said: ‘One of the important things is that up until now if I submit a paper to a journal I've been signing away the copyright, and that's actually ridiculous...’ Speaking to BBC Radio’s Today programme, he said the paradox was that peer review was one of the biggest costs of publishing papers: scientists do it for free and then the fruits of their review work are ‘locked behind a paywall’. This week’s moves will be welcomed by nearly 9,000 researchers who signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing, initiated by Tim Gowers, the British mathematician. It is part of a campaign that supporters call the 'academic spring', due to its aim to revolutionise the spread of knowledge. The European Commission's Kroes stressed that its digital openness proposal would be about sharing both findings and data. On data, she said the world was just beginning to realise how significant a transformation of science the openness enabled by ICT infrastructures can mean. ‘We [are entering] the era of open science,’ she said. ‘Take ‘Big Data’ analysis. Every year, the scientific community produces data 20 times as large as that held in the US Library of Congress.’ Big data needs big collaboration. Without that, it is not possible to collect, combine and conclude results from different experiments, in different countries and disciplines, she added, citing the example of genome sequencing... ‘That is why we've invested in high-speed research networks like GÉANT. Today, GÉANT is connecting millions of researchers, scholars, educators and students. That is why we want to promote ever better and open infrastructures for research collaboration...’ The UK government has already signalled its intention to press for increased access to public knowledge or data created by publicly funded research and universities... In the long run there is a huge potential cost saving to make, since British universities spend £200 million a year on subscriptions to electro