‘Very ambitious’ EU publishing stance signed off and welcomed

Broad swath of academic organisations say they can work with policymakers to improve scholarly publishing

Potentially transformative positions on scholarly publishing have now been agreed by the EU’s member state governments, receiving a warm initial welcome from the academic sector.

On 23 May, EU research ministers adopted a set of conclusions stating that immediate open access to papers reporting publicly funded research should become the norm, with transparent pricing and without authors having to pay fees, and that the bloc should better support non-profit scholarly publishing models.