The European University Association (EUA) has published its Open Access Survey Report 2016-2017 and is launching the 2017-2018 Open Access Survey. The Open Access Survey tracks universities’ progress towards open access by looking at the degree to which they have implemented institutional policies and practices in the field.
Since its inception in 2014, the initiative has collected input from 400 different institutions across Europe, providing EUA with the basis for a series of recommendations in 2017:
Already in its third edition, the 2016-2017 survey gathered responses from 338 universities and higher education institutions from 39 European countries.
The results of this survey show the increasing commitment from European universities in implementing Open Access policies for research publications. Source: EUA 2017-2018 Open Access Survey
Nearly three out of four institutions have a repository. And seven out of ten institutions’ repositories are aggregated by OpenAIRE.
However, it reveals that progress is much feebler in open access to research data. To quote from the survey:
“The following questions remain unsolved and pertinent:
How to control the costs of accessing publications (pay to read and/or pay to publish), especially counting on the expectation that an increase in the number of open access journals should lead to a decrease in the cost of subscriptions;
How to engage researchers in new methods and tools based on open science in a quicker and more globalised way;
How to speed up regulatory processes to ensure a higher degree of fairness and simplification in terms of copyright, text and data mining and open access to research data;
How to increase fairness in the evaluation of scientific papers;
How to transform research assessment (and thus the management of researchers’ careers) by departing from the hypocrisy of the journal impact factor.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
The European University Association (EUA) has published its Open Access Survey Report 2016-2017 and is launching the 2017-2018 Open Access Survey.
