In dramatic statement, European leaders call for ‘immediate’ open access to all scientific papers by 2020 | Science | AAAS

"In what European science chief Carlos Moedas calls a "life-changing" move, E.U. member states today agreed on an ambitious new open-access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020....The council's statement is also slightly ambiguous on what exactly should be accomplished by 2020. It calls for "immediate" OA, "without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes." Many non-OA journals currently allow authors to make their papers available—for instance in an institutional repository—6 or 12 months after publication, but the essence of immediate OA is that a paper is freely available when it gets published. How short journal-imposed embargoes would have to become to qualify as "immediate" OA remains unclear...."