EUROPA - Press Releases - Neelie Kroes Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda The Challenge of Open Access Launch of OpenAIRE, the European infrastructure for open access publishing of research results Ghent, 2 December 2010

"Free online access to peer-reviewed scientific publications has emerged as a potent ingredient of this process of sharing. This is because knowledge grows when shared. Thus wider participation means better science. This principle is widely accepted in the scientific community, although many individual scientists are still slow to put it in practice. I like to see open access as an opportunity. It is an opportunity to enhance communication within the scientific community, and especially across disciplines. It is also an opportunity to disseminate the results of research more efficiently. Isn't it an excellent example of Information and Communication Technologies in the service of scientific progress? I don't want to go into technical details but I want to stress that this means much more than just downloading articles in PDF. It also means new ways of indexing, annotating, ordering and linking research results – and new methods to automate all this. I am convinced that we will see new services developing on top of the information infrastructure open access provides....Open access can also encourage and enable greater engagement of society in science....Open access also helps to reach the wider public whose access to the results of science is difficult - if not impossible -without it....Open access can also foster innovation even beyond the scientific community....But above all, open access to scientific information is important because it helps citizens to their right to have access to knowledge produced using public funds....The right to access freely the results of science does not only benefit citizens but also the public funding bodies. I believe public scrutiny of research results will improve how we allocate research funds. It will also increase the citizens' confidence in research spending. The long-term effect will be to help governments to make the investments we need to secure a sustainable and inclusive future. Open access can thus be understood as supporting the Open Government principle, helping to bring about better public services. Open access is a legal and technical reality today. The question is no longer ‘if’ we should have open access. The question is about ‘how’ we should develop it further and promote it....To conclude: the beauty of open access is that it is not against anybody. It is for the free movement of knowledge...."