EU council’s resolution on open scholarly publishing
On the 23rd of May 2023, the Council of the European Union has adopted a Resolution on "High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing", calling in particular for immediate OA to publications that present the results of publicly funded research.
EU Council notes that the current system of scholarly publishing is operated by various for-profit and not-for-profit organisations and that the increasing costs of paywalls for access to scientific publications and for scholarly publishing cause inequalities and are becoming unsustainable for public research funders and institutions accountable for the spending of public funds, decreasing funding available for research. Therefore the Council highlights the importance of not-for-profit, scholarly open access publishing models that do not charge fees to authors or readers and stresses the importance of supporting the development of such models led by public research organisations.
Next, the Council criticises situations where researchers are limited in their choice of publication channels due to financial capacities rather than quality criteria, and where access to research publications is restricted by paywalls. In this context, the Council welcomes coordination within the EU and with global partners to support equity in scholarly publishing, taking account of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.
In the end, the Council encourages Member States and the Commission to step up support to the development of aligned institutional and funding policies and strategies regarding not-for-profit open access multi-format scholarly publishing models in Europe with no costs for authors or readers, and to set and implement roadmaps or action plans for a significant expansion of such publishing models.
Masaryk University publishes more than 45 scientific journals and more than half of its book production in Diamond Open Access (i.e. free of charge for authors and readers). Therefore, together with other European institutions, we welcome the Council's decision and, as the leading Open Access institution in the Czech Republic, we are ready to co-operate in developing the aforementioned Action Plans and policies.
The original EU Council’s Resolution can be found here.