Agencies set standards for open-access publishing

Science Europe, the association of European national research organisations and funders, has set the minimum standards it expects from open-access services provided by academic publishers and paid for by researchers.

In the standards, agreed at a meeting on 15 April, indexing, copyright, sustainable archiving and machine readability were all identified as areas where the open-access publishing industry needs clearer regulation and standardisation.

Science Europe said that authors must be given full copyright to their work with no restrictions. Authors should be able to self-archive their work in registered repositories without delay—a contrast to current practices at publishers such as Wiley, who requests an embargo period of up to 12 months for science and 24 months for social science articles published in its journals.