Moedas urges publishers to get serious on open access - Science|Business

"EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas has called on publishers to stop resisting open access, telling them they need to be part of this fundamental change in the way science operates ... In parallel, Moedas said, 'Digital technologies [will] inevitably have the same ground-breaking impact on scientific publishing as they have already had on the media, music, film and telecommunication industries.'   In open access publishing, the author, not the reader, pays the publishing costs.  Advocates include scientists, libraries and universities, which take a dim view of paying subscriptions that run into the thousands of euros per year, to get access to the outputs of publicly-funded research. Instead, government-financed science should be made available on the Internet immediately, free for anyone.  Opponents of open access, including many private and non-profit publishers, argue unrestrained access would make journals financially unviable and undermine the peer-review and article selection system that has underpinned scientific publishing for centuries.  Moedas issued the statement  at a meeting on Monday with the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, Sander Dekker, whose government last year said 60 per cent of research articles authored by Dutch scientists must be open access by 2019, and 100 per cent by 2024.  Since then, Dutch universities have reached outline agreements on open access with three publishers, Springer, Wiley and Sage, but are in a standoff on the issue with Amsterdam-based Elsevier, the largest journal publishing house in the world ..."