10/29/2008
The European Commission has thrown its weight behind the movement to make science and scholarship more transparent and socially responsible. The European Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potočnik, supports the call for open access, which will make scientific and scholarly information freely available via digital storage areas (“repositories”) on the Internet. SURF has been pressing for open access since 2004 and actively promotes this development in the Netherlands. Mr Potočnik has now written to SURF’s director, Wim Liebrand, telling him that the Commission will encourage all recipients of EU subsidies to make published scientific/scholarly articles available to the public. This will prevent similar research being duplicated, thus saving researchers time and resources. Mr Liebrand is extremely gratified by the EU’s support: “After years of verbal support for the idea that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible, the EU is now actually taking steps to make that idea a reality.”
Mr Potočnik also speaks highly of the powerful open access initiatives by Knowledge Exchange, the European partnership of national education and research institutions, which resulted in the Berlin Declaration, a widely supported call for public availability of publically financed research results. The European Commission has taken the petition to heart and the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (“FP7”) includes a pilot project for open access. The programme obliges researchers to make the results of subsidised research available via a digital repository. The pilot project is evidence of the European Commission’s commitment to making the results of research carried out within FP7 available as widely and effectively as possible with the aim of achieving the optimum impact both inside and outside the world of science and scholarship.
The Commission is also helping to build up the infrastructure for providing access to scientific/scholarly information. Examples of this action include financing infrastructural projects such as DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) and a variety of studies to examine the effect of new business models for scientific publication. Mr Potočnik concludes that the Member States intend formulating joint policy on access to scientific/scholarly information.
The “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” calls on researchers to make their material freely available to all via repositories on the Internet. This means not only articles but also raw data and other research material. Users must be able not only to consult and distribute all this but also make use of derived works. The only condition is that the original author should be credited.
SURF signed the Berlin Declaration on 1 December 2004 and promotes open access in the Netherlands. SURF therefore strives for standardised, coherent and interoperable open access to scientific and scholarly material. Examples of services: Narcis, LOREnet and the HBO-Kennisbank. Further developments are carried out by SURF through the SURFshare programme, the follow-up of the DARE programme.
About SURF
SURF is the collaborative organisation for academic universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutions aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. SURF supports higher education and research in taking optimum advantage of the possibilities offered by ICT to improve the quality of education and research.
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Background information on open access.
SURF's view on Open: open access, open source and open standards.