Important steps towards implementing Open Access and Open Science have been achieved, but there still remains significant work that needs to be done.
Open Science (OS) is an important concern of the European Union, and the debate around OS has intensified especially as its need was highlighted in the fight against COVID-19. The concept of OS has evolved within the European framework programmes from the concept of Open Access (OA) in the 7th and 8th programme to OS in the 9th programme. While OA is used for the practice of providing free online access to scholarly publications and data, the OA to content and information is only one aspect of OS, which goes beyond and more broadly refers to the conduction and dissemination of research in a more transparent and collaborative way.
The European Commission (EC) aims to implement OS through the Horizon Europe programme, which includes the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as one of the 20 actions of the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2022-2024. In February 2022, the French Presidency of the Council of the EU organised the Paris Open Science European Conference (OSEC). The key topics at this conference addressed the transformation of the research and innovation ecosystem in Europe in order to advance further with OS. During the conference, with the presentation of the Paris Call on Research Assessment, there was the political announcement of the current creation of a coalition of research funding organisations, research performing organisations, and assessment authorities committed to reforming the current research assessment system along commonly agreed objectives, principles and actions. On an international level, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was adopted by 193 countries in November 2021. It serves as an international framework for OS policy and practice, taking into account differences in perspectives and approaches, especially regional differences, and challenges for scientists. Moreover, Plan S, an initiative for OA publishing that is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, was launched in September 2018. From 2021, it requires all scientific publications resulting from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies to either be published in OA journals or platforms, or immediately made available through OA Repositories (digital archives) without embargo. However, they allow for a transition period where publications can also be made available in hybrid journals, provided that these journals are covered by a transformative agreement that offsets subscription fees against publication fees. Additionally, Science Europe, cOAlition S, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) have drafted an Action Plan for Diamond OA that was published on 2 March 2022, and which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The Action Plan proposes to align and develop common resources for the Diamond OA ecosystem, connecting Diamond OA journals and platforms through shared principles and standards.
Even if OA is becoming increasingly common, there remains a lot to be done. In this context, the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research (CESAER), a European association of universities of science and technology, published on 4 April 2022 a white paper concerning the successful implementation of OA strategies at Universities of Science & Technology (S&T). It identifies four key factors that contribute to a successful implementation of Open Access at institutions, namely: i. OA policies; ii. institutional system configuration; iii. institutional research support staff; and iv. OA advocacy strategies, and provides an analysis of the implementation of those factors at specific Member institutions of the Open Access Working Group (OAWG) that have experienced large climbs in the CWTS Leiden Ranking in terms of OA, aiming to provide guidance for universities of S&T that may wish to increase their OA publications. In the period 2016-2019, the University of Fribourg was the highest placed Swiss university in terms of OA in the CWTS Leiden Ranking, with 83.8% of their publications being OA. On 27 April 2022, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) released figures on their OA publications in 2020. Of a total of 13’938 publications in 2020, 63% were freely accessible. The increase of OA since their last analysis in 2020 is in part due to the contracts negotiated by swissuniversities with large publishers and the trend towards pure OA journals. The SNSF is continuing its efforts to accelerate the transition to 100% OA, for instance through their pilot project with the platform “ChronosHub” that facilitates the publication of articles and the payment of fees in OA-only journals for researchers.
Furthermore, on 7 April 2022, the European Commission (EC) published a report on Open Science and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The report analyses aspects such as copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, and formulates recommendations for policymakers and for practitioners. Recommendations for policymakers include, for example, reviewing and amending EU legislation with regards to OS and IPR, making sure that current IPR standards keep up with rapid technological developments, promoting basic science, or the creation of an Office for Free Intellectual Property Rights and Open Science. They highlight the importance of finding the right balance between OS and IPR, calling for support to authors that want to provide for the openness of their work in the same way as to authors of closed works. The recommendations for practitioners refer to lessons learned from the free software communities, especially regarding licences, for instance the necessity of updating licences due to technological or legal developments, or the standardisation of the references to licences. Furthermore, they recommend that if the terms and conditions of a data set are not clear or if no consent has been given, it should be treated as an ‘all rights reserved’ piece of information, which makes including a license even more important.
On 18 and 19 October 2022, Science Europe is organising an Open Science Conference, which brings together institutional leaders, researchers and experts to present current policies regarding OS, as well as to discuss the transition to OS.