EU survey confirms: 90% support Open Access for publicly funded research publications

The EU recently released the results of the survey “scientific information in the digital age”. They are based on 1140 responses from Member states, coming from research funding organisations, university/research institutes, libraries, publishers, international organisations and individual researchers.

The survey focused on the three topics “scientific publications”, “research data” and “Preservation of digital scientific information”. Concerning scientific publications the answers were:

• 84% see access problems to scientific publications in Europe
• The main reasons are seen in high prices of journals/subscriptions (89 %) and limited library budgets (85 %)
• 91% agree that Open Access increases the dissemination of scientific publications
• 90% support the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should be avaliable in open access
• 56% see six months as a desirable embargo period for licensed material, before it has to be available in open access
• 86% agree on the development of an EU network of repositories