Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access

Academic consortia urge faster changes in scholarly publishing. T he Netherlands is leading what it hopes will be a pan-European effort in 2016 to push scholarly publishers towards open-access (OA) business models: making more papers free for all users as soon as they are published. In 2014, publishers worldwide made 17% of new papers OA immediately on publication , up from 12% in 2011 (see 'Growth of open access'). But most papers are still locked behind paywalls when they are first published. The Dutch government, which took over the six-month rotating presidency of the Euro-pean Union council of ministers this month, has declared furthering OA to be one of its top priorities. With strong support from Carlos Moedas, the EU's research commissioner, it is planning a series of discussions on the issue — between European science ministers at the end of January (with a keynote talk from Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation strongly supports OA) and at an EU presidency conference on open science in April. At that forum, the European Commission is expected to launch an 'Open Science Policy Platform' with a remit that includes investigating how subscription publishers can best transition to OA. The Association of Universities in the Neth-erlands (VSNU), a consortium of 14 institutes, has already taken radical steps. With backing from the Dutch government, it has negotiated several deals with major publishers over the past two years to make more Dutch papers open in subscription journals, with the aim of shifting the journals to an OA business model. The deals are a " great step forward to an OA world " , says Paul Ayris, head of library services at University College London and a spokesperson for the League of European Research Universities, which has urged the commission and the Dutch presidency to speed the OA transition. In 2014, the VSNU announced a deal in which it renewed its subscription to a bundle of 2,000 paywalled journals from the publisher Springer, but with terms that made papers by corresponding authors at subscribing Dutch universities OA, for no extra charge. (Springer has since merged with Nature's publisher.) Shortly before Christmas 2015, the VSNU announced a similar agreement with Elsevier, which the consortium had threatened to boycott if its demands were not met: by 2018, 30% of Dutch papers will be OA in VSNU-subscribed Elsevier journals. The hope, Ayris says, is that if other nations' organizations can …