Editorial - Paving the way for open access

Since the Dutch government launched its mission of “full open access by 2024” in November 2013, a lot of progress has been made. After two years of hard work, the association of universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) recently issued a mid-term review . More strongly than its English version, the Dutch title “Nederland: gidsland naar open access” (“The Netherlands: guiding country to open access”) expresses optimism and pride about the remarkable results achieved so far: Since last autumn, deals with Elsevier, Wiley and SAGE have literally made thousands of journals available for APC-free “gold” open access publishing by Dutch researchers–in addition to the many journals already available with Springer.

But “gold” is not all that glitters. Not all journals are available (or affordable) for gold open access publishing, and funders like NWO and EU/ERC require open access now. NWO, for example, tightened its conditions as of 1 December 2015. It now requires “immediate Open Access at the moment of publication”. Therefore, green open access–depositing your publication in an institutional or discipline repository–will be indispensable for some time to come.

For the humanities and social sciences, APC-free “diamond” open access seems promising. With much of the research internally funded, editorial boards of new and migrating journals cannot but appeal to institutional sponsorships for covering the costs of publishing. Sponsorship can be financial, but also technical and “in kind”–like the publication facilities offered by the University of Groningen Library. Both forms of sponsorship were discussed at the well-attended symposium in last October's Open Access Week.

Finally, open access to publications is just one element towards open science. Open data is another. This issue of our newsletter shows how our researchers are involved in all of the above.

Enjoy reading!