Making all science open access by 2020

The EU Competitiveness Council, a committee including research, science, and industry ministers from all member countries, announced last week that scientific publications should all be open access by 2020. We all wish for this to happen, but is the idea utopian?

There are many hurdles to overcome. Firstly, there are no legal bindings. According to the council itself, it is only a “political orientation for the 28 governments”. Secondly, four years is a very short period for such a dramatic change in the publication process, especially when encountering strong resistance from the private publishing industry whose interests are at stake. Thirdly, the actual details to achieve this goal have yet to be announced.

Felix contacted private scientific publishing groups but they all declined to comment about the EU report. Through a spokesperson from the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), they announced “it is vital that embargo periods (when articles are only available through paid subscriptions) be set at a sustainable level to enable the subscription model to continue to support the operation of high quality journals”.

Researchers disagree, especially when it comes to matters of public importance. According to Professor Stephen Curry, a biologist here at Imperial and open access advocate, the slow release of articles is actually harmful. “There was a recent initiative to encourage people working on the Zika virus research to release their initial data and their results very quickly even in advance of publication. But we still haven’t moved to such a system for antimicrobial resistance, HIV infection and malaria, and that in itself have cost lives”.

Another counter-argument is the financial burden. “The upfront costs for an immediate transition will need to be covered. These costs will currently fall disproportionally on research-intensive countries that produce more research relative to the rest of the world,” claims the STM.

However, it might be a fallacious argument. “I think you have to recognize that most of this research is publicly funded and all the money that goes to pay for subscriptions at the minute is largely publicly funded as well,” commented Prof. Curry. “Because most of the work is publicly funded it has to be made open access by right, and I think there is enough money in the system to fund that. It is just a manner of moving the accounts around”.

It is already unlikely that universal open access will be achieved by 2020, but through incremental steps in governmental policies and consensus we may slowly start to separate access to scientific information from corporate profits although that requires patience.