Brussels: Europe and the Arabs
Today the Council of the European Union adopted Conclusions on “high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scientific publishing”, in which it calls for immediate and unrestricted open access in the publication of research involving public funds.
“If we truly believe in open science, we need to make sure that researchers can make their findings available and reusable and that high-quality scientific articles are openly available to anyone who needs to read them. This should be particularly the case for research that benefits from funding General: What has been paid for by all shall be within the reach of all. According to a European statement issued in Brussels by Mats Persson, the Swedish Minister of Education and Research, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Union.

Scientific publishing risks
Scientific articles and other forms of scholarly publication are still the primary means of dissemination of research results and scientific findings. However, not every article is available to other researchers or other interested readers. Paywall costs for accessing and publishing articles are becoming unsustainable, and publishing channels for researchers are often in the hands of private companies, which often control the intellectual property of the articles. Peer review of articles is essential to ensure quality control of articles, but this process comes with challenges such as an increased number of submissions and reviewer fatigue. There is also the issue of questionable and predatory posting practices.
In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and Member States to support policies towards a not-for-profit, open-access, multiple-format scholarly publishing model, without any costs to authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary copyright into their national copyright legislation, allowing open access to scholarly publications involving public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately and openly available under open licences.
The conclusions acknowledge positive developments with regard to monitoring progress, such as in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) framework, and suggest that open science monitoring be included in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The conclusions of the Council also encourage Member States to support the pilot program Open Research Europe (to create a service for publishing open research at scale), to use open source software and standards, to recognize and reward peer review activities in the evaluation of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers in peer review skills and intellectual property rights .