"A lot of lip service is being paid to making scientific papers free to access but when it comes to action there is a lot of hypocrisy, according to Robert-Jan Smits, the EU's outgoing director-general for research, science and innovation. He has recently been appointed the EU's special envoy on open access, tasked with helping make all publicly funded research in Europe freely available by 2020.
Making scientific publications free to read is a big change in a world dominated by subscription journals. Why is it so important that science publications become open access?
At the moment we are putting a lot of public money at national, European and global level into science. But we don’t have free access to the published results of the research we fund because this is locked behind paywalls. We have to spend an enormous amount of money each year on subscriptions to journals where scientific articles are published and on making these results immediately available in open access. Imagine if all the billions we are now putting into these expensive subscription journals could be put into research. That’s also why in the 3 O’s policy of Commissioner Moedas (the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation), open access is mentioned explicitly as a top priority within the open science agenda.
'Open access to research results will help to have more and faster innovations, to have quicker solutions to the problems we are facing and to allow further research to be carried out.
'There is with regard to open access also another dimension, to which we don't pay a lot of attention. If we want to see that also in the developing countries a science base is being built, we should give these countries easy and low-cost access to scientific publications because these countries just cannot afford to pay for these expensive subscription journals.'"
