Europe moves closer to open access (OA) publishing

The UK government declared that all papers funded by its research agencies would have to be Open Access (OA) by April 2013, and the European Commission (EC) made a similar announcement for 2014 regarding its billion-euro Horizon 2020 research program. 

...The main EC push for OA “is to enable wider access to academic research to the vast majority who do not have access to research libraries,” says Tony Doyle, chair of CERN’s ATLAS Publications Committee. An additional attraction, says Victor Henning, CEO of information company Mendeley, is that OA “will allow more effective data mining. Third-party research apps are querying Mendeley’s database more than 100 million times per month, and this number would explode if we could offer more open-access articles.”

There are two main types of OA: With “gold,” the publisher receives a fee—often called an article processing charge (APC)—from the author or author’s institution, and the article is made free at the point of publication. In the “green” strategy, no fee is paid and the publisher’s PDF or author’s final version is placed on a freely accessible website...