Open Access in Europe | Quantumplations

"I’ve just got back from Guimarães, Portugal where I attended the kick off meeting for PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategy for European Union Research). PASTEUR4OA is a multi-partner European project aiming to help EU Member States develop and implement policies to ensure Open Access to all outputs from publicly funded research, helping to develop (or reinforce) open access strategies and policies at national level. Part of this work will involve mapping existing policies at national and institutional levels, and part of this will be directly engaging policy makers, and helping to develop national centers of expertise. It was a great opportunity to meet (and remeet) many people from across the EU interested in Open Acccess, including representatives of SPARC Europe, Jisc and the Open University. I’m involved in this work as part of my role at the Open Knowledge Foundation. One key aspect of this project will be strengthening the existing Open Access community at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and increasing engagement between our community and policy makers across the EU. Another key aim will be pushing hard to ensure that when people talk about ‘open access’ as part of this project, they are using the term as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative and in agreement with the Open Definition, considering the right to reuse and not just the right to view. Often when people talk about Open Access they are just thinking about the right to view, and the need for free access to research. Within Europe policy makers are largely on board with the idea of research being ‘free to view’, and Horizon 2020 also has a requirement for journal articles resulting from funding to be published in a manner that is free to view. However, the research articles are not *required* to be free to reuse – and I think it’s important that we try and convince policy makers about this requirement.  I’m going to put my thinking cap on over the next few weeks about good case studies about content mining and other benefits of reuse. If you have any bright ideas about case studies – please do contact me! These examples can either be possible scenarios, or examples taking place right now. I want to get a collection together as soon as possible and provide them to advocates talking to policy makers!"