EUA supports call for the exclusion of education and research from the obligations of the Digital Services Act

EUA and other associations representing European universities, research performing organisations, research funding organisations, research libraries, and repositories in Europe have released a joint statement in the context of ongoing trilogue negotiations on the Digital Services Act (DSA). Proposed in 2020 by the European Commission, the DSA is intended to enable greater democratic control and oversight of digital platforms and to mitigate systemic risks associated with the digital transformation, such as manipulation or disinformation. Despite its ambitious approach to regulating online platforms, the European Commission has never adequately distinguished the public mandate of not-for-profit scientific and educational repositories and archives supporting Open Science from the activities of commercial online platforms. Therefore, various financial and administrative requirements are likely to be applied to the system of repositories and archives that is run by universities for free access, sharing and reuse of research data and results. For this reason, EUA and its partners are calling for the exclusion of not-for-profit educational and scientific repositories, digital archives and libraries from the DSA obligations.