The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has welcomed the balanced legislation in the new Spanish Science Law.
The Plenary of the House of Representatives adopted the Law on Science, Technology and Innovation by 289 votes in favour, 3 against and no abstentions. The bill updates the 1986 law, Spain's first scientific legislation after becoming a democracy.
Article 37 of the wide-ranging bill includes encouragement for the development of open access repositories. It also mandates deposit of research outputs funded by the General Budget of the State in publicly accessible repositories within twelve months of publication. This applies to the authors accepted version of the manuscript, and the bill requires third party agreements such as copyright transfer to be respected.
While the bill was being debated, STM has asked the Spanish Government, Ministry for Science and Innovation to consider more flexibility in terms of embargo periods for public access. Not every discipline or sub-discipline has the same attitude to material being available before final publication, nor does every discipline have the same pattern of access to scientific articles.
STM has called on the Spanish government to make funds available to government-funded researchers for open access publication. Publishers are committed to the wide dissemination and unrestricted access to content they publish, on the understanding that services that publishers provide must be paid for in some way. Unfunded mandates for self-archiving have the potential to undermine the sustainability of STM publishing with negative impacts on scholarly communication, the Association noted.
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