EU Commission backs Open Access

The European Commission, which controls one of the world's largest science budgets, has backed calls for free access to publicly funded research... "Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and they need seamless access to raw data," said Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda.

The best known example of the economic benefit of open access to research findings was the results from the project to decode human DNA in 2003. The commission says that by 2010, an original research investment of about 3 billion euros in the genome project had generated 500 billion euros of economic activity.