The University of Barcelona signs up the LERU statement on open access
Coinciding with the Open Access Week, the rector of the University of Barcelona, Dr Dídac Ramírez, has signed up the statement Moving Forwards on Open Access elaborated by the League of European Research Universities (LERU). The document calls upon the European Commission to strongly support open access policies in order to ensure that research funding goes to research, not to publishers.
Coinciding with the Open Access Week, the rector of the University of Barcelona, Dr Dídac Ramírez, has signed up the statement Moving Forwards on Open Access elaborated by the League of European Research Universities (LERU). The document calls upon the European Commission to strongly support open access policies in order to ensure that research funding goes to research, not to publishers.
Nowadays, European universities pay publishers significant parts of their university budget. In the case of the University of Barcelona, that means around five million euros per year. Besides subscription costs, academic research funding is also largely affected by article processing charges (APC), which come at an additional cost of €2,000 per article, on average, when making individual articles gold open access. Some publishers are in this way even being paid twice for the same content ("double dipping").
In the era of open science, the main goal of LERU statement is to promote open access publications as a cornerstone of the new research paradigm and business models must support this transition. One of these models is the green road to open access, a strategy proposed in 2002 that consists of self-archiving articles in a repository where they can be accessed for free.
New site on open access
The Learning and Research Resources Centre (CRAI) of the University of Barcelona has just published a new site that describes some basic concepts about open access: how to make publications open access, what founding options offers the University, etc. It also includes updated information about repositories and European policies on publications.