ALLEA and Partners Call for Stronger Action on Open Science in the European Research Area
On 13 May, in the context of the ongoing consultation on the European Research Area (ERA) Act, ALLEA joined forces with EIFL, IFLA, LIBER, OPERAS, and SPARC Europe to issue a joint Statement calling for renewed political commitment to Open Science as a cornerstone of a strong, competitive, and resilient European Research Area.
The Statement was issued on behalf of thousands of European universities, research-performing organisations, libraries, scholarly infrastructures, and academies of sciences and humanities.
While substantial progress has been made in recent years through initiatives such as the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, the ERA Policy Agenda, and national Open Science strategies, significant barriers continue to hinder equitable participation in, and access to, Open Science across Europe. Financial, linguistic, geographic, and legal inequalities remain major obstacles to the full realisation of an open and inclusive research ecosystem. In the Statement, the signatories emphasised that including targeted legislative measures to support Open Science in the ERA Act would be a necessary, but insufficient, move to create a sustainable open research culture – achieving true openness will require sustained investment in infrastructures, policy alignment, incentives, and community-led initiatives across the European research ecosystem.
The statement highlights Open Science as fundamental to the free circulation of knowledge and essential for strengthening research integrity, transparency, reproducibility, evidence-based policymaking, and European competitiveness. It also emphasises that Open Science is crucial for ensuring Europe’s strategic autonomy and capacity to respond to societal and geopolitical challenges.
Key Highlights Include:
- Ensure immediate Open Access (OA) to publicly funded research outputs, including publications, research data, software, methods, and protocols.
- We need to advance equitable, not-for-profit and publicly governed publishing models, including Diamond OA and publish-review-curate models, to become new standard models and trusted open repositories that enable dissemination without financial or technical barriers.
- Establish harmonised legal frameworks, including a Secondary Publication Right, to enable researchers to share and reuse publicly funded research without embargoes or contractual restrictions.
- A coherent and coordinated approach is needed to enable effective data reuse across Europe.
- ‘As open as possible, as closed as necessary’ approaches make it possible to address legitimate concerns around security and risk while facilitating responsible research innovation.
The signatories called on European institutions and Member States to seize the opportunity presented by the ERA Act to create the enabling conditions necessary for a research ecosystem that is responsibly open, innovative, inclusive, resilient, and above all, grounded in European values.
Read the full Statement here.
