ALLEA Statement on Equity in Open Access | ALLEA

Today, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) published the statement “Equity in Open Access” that addresses how “gold” open access publishing routes and large read-and-write deals contribute to establishing inequitable structures within academic research.

“If we make scholarship free to read, but very expensive to write, we end up reinforcing inequitable structures of privilege and power within the academic system; this is not a price we should be prepared to pay,” says Prof Luke Drury, Chair of the ALLEA Open Science Task Force.

The statement builds on this year’s theme of the International Open Access Week (25-30 October), ‘It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity’, which was in turn inspired by one of the four core values of Open Science, as defined in the recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science:

“Open Science should play a significant role in ensuring equity among researchers from developed and developing countries, enabling fair and reciprocal sharing of scientific inputs and outputs and equal access to scientific knowledge to both producers and consumers of knowledge regardless of location, nationality, race, age, gender, income, socio-economic circumstances, career stage, discipline, language, religion, disability, ethnicity or migratory status or any other grounds.” (UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, Page 7)

It also reflects the first of the eight key principles for scientific publishing recently adopted by the General Assembly of the International Science Council:

“There should be universal open access to the record of science, both for authors and readers, with no barriers to participation, in particular those based on ability to pay, institutional privilege, language or geography.”