Connecting the EU research dots
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nd other tools that require costly parts or maintenance by non-Brazilian technicians and engineers. A very restrictive funding situation could also jeopardize national projects like Sirius and a planned multipurpose nuclear reactor. In response to these concerns, scientists, funding agencies, and scientific organizations from across the country are meeting with politicians and ministers, organizing seminars, writing letters to the press, and holding protests. “I would risk saying that, in addition to organizing their annual meetings, this has been the most important activity of all these societies in the past year and still is currently,” Zanotto says. There is cautious optimism that these efforts will create change, and a
Connecting the EU research dots www.pasteur4oa.eu
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he first step toward open access to research findings is an open discussion on what this involves and how it can be achieved. The EU-funded project called PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research)—which ran from February 2014 to July 2016—brought together experts to develop and reinforce open access strategies and policies across Member States in a coordinated and collaborative approach. The premise of this project was that it is essential that a scientist working in one country has access to relevant research happening in another. Funders across the globe, including the European Commission, acknowledge the numerous benefits of open access to publicly funded research. The European Commission has a mandatory open access policy for research publications and a pilot for open access to research data in the context of Horizon 2020. Furthermore, in its 2012 Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information, the Commission has recommended that Member States develop policies to allow for open access to publicly funded research.
Member States, funders, and research institutions are gradually developing open access policies. The PASTEUR4OA project supported the development of policies that are aligned with the 2012 Recommendation and Horizon 2020 rules. “Our goal was to record and analyze the policy situation regarding open access to research findings, as in general the whole policy picture was rather murky,” says Project Co-director Alma Swan. “There was some understanding of what policies were out there, and we knew that while some were very effective, others were not—so this project was an opportunity to have a go at settling the mud.” The project began by searching for open access policies around the world and recording them in detail. “Once we had all the policies and all their characteristics recorded, we used this information to analyze the anatomy of a good policy,” Swan says. What they concluded was that a policy must be mandatory and firmly established as a rule and not an option for research results to become available in open access. The project showed that for this to happen, especially in research institutions, it is most efficient that a policy for open access be
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