Building on the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and on the progress that has been achieved so far, OpenAIRE is pursuing the large-scale implementation of free online access to, and largely unrestricted use and re-use of scholarly research articles. OpenAIRE is an EC-funded initiative which aims to support the Open Access policy of the European Commission via a technical infrastructure.
Open Access is a key tool for promoting scientific research, improving the quality of research and the free dissemination of knowledge in society. Even though Open Access is now a shared vision of the world's academic communities, research institutions and funding bodies, nearly 85% of the world's scholarly outputs are still locked behind paywalls, inhibiting the full impact of scientific research and miring the dissemination of scholarly outputs in an obsolete and dysfunctional system.
OpenAIRE recognises and endorses various ways of implementing open access (OA), including the development of new OA publishing platforms, archives and repositories. In scholarly journal publishing, OA has gained a substantial and increasing volume. Most journals, however, are still based on the subscription business model with its inherent deficiencies in terms of access, cost-efficiency, transparency, and restrictions of use.
To gain the full benefits of OA and enable a smooth, swift and scholarly oriented transition, the existing corpus of scholarly journals should be converted from subscription to open access. Recent developments and studies indicate that this transition process can be realised within the framework of currently available resources.
With this statement, OpenAIRE expresses its interest in establishing an international initiative for the OA transformation of scholarly journals. The initiative aims to transform a majority of today's scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing in accordance with community-specific publication preferences. At the same time, continue to support new and improved forms of OA publishing. It is inviting all parties involved in scholarly publishing, in particular universities, research institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large. As a first step, OpenAIRE is urging institutions to establish Open Access policies and Institution professors / researchers to submit their post-print scientific papers to academic depositories immediately after approval for their publication (Green route to OA).
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