LIBER wants #ZeroEmbargo on Publicly-Funded Scientific Publications.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced the virtues of Open Access and propelled changes in scholarly communication that previously many feared, the current models of communicating scientific content still maintain unequal access to content.

On the other side of this highly regulated and controlled system, advocates of Open Access are exploring lawful ways to enable researchers to freely disseminate their research and maximize its impact.

The Rights Retention Strategy of PlanS (cOAlitionS) is a much-welcomed initiative that empowers authors to be in control of their own research and the granting schemes of HorizonEurope is another bold move by the European Commission in the same direction. It is now time that policies like these are implemented in all EU Member States and that the countries themselves have the same coordinated and horizontal approach.

Therefore, LIBER proposes a new model law that aims to ensure a zero embargo period for lawful self-archiving on open, public, non-for-profit repositories.

Read our model law here. 

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LIBER, representing more than 450 libraries from all European countries, understands well that not all scholars are in a position to participate in Gold OA schemes, some of which are challenging the public claims for transparency and disrespect public funds. This leads to severe fragmentation of the European scientific publishing production; a separation that sustains the inequalities in our continent and stalls European research and innovation.

LIBER also understands that, in line with other Open Science initiatives, such as the Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity and the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, this has to be format, language, and discipline agnostic. These should be the topics of our priority and not conform to artificial constructs, such as the versions of documents, that simulate print-based economies and timelines in a digital world. The advance of alternative funding programmes and the acclimation of many publishing schemes, for-, and not-for-profit, in the Open Science ecosystem, show that there are visible and tangible solutions. 

With our new proposed public law, we want to establish lawful routes that might not be new in conception, but now the time has come to be implemented. LIBER will continue to work for the implementation of these routes, to support scholars in the evolving system of European research and innovation, and to actively participate in European infrastructures, such as Open Research Europe and the European Open Science Cloud.

Read our model law here. 

 

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