Call for multi-pronged publishing policy

Academic leaders favour scrapping republication embargoes and allowing full reuse of research papers

Academic leaders have urged the EU to adopt a multi-pronged approach to giving researchers more rights to disseminate their papers. They have embraced a study for the European Commission, published last month, which proposed options for EU-wide policies to give researchers the right to republish their papers in open-access repositories after publication in a journal, known as secondary publication rights. 

The SPR study, conducted by a consortium led by the consultancy PPMI, was commissioned as part of policymakers’ efforts to make the EU’s copyright and data laws better suited to facilitating research. It set out various options for consideration, without endorsing any.