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An important week for scholarly publishing in Europe

16 December 2015

The second week in December has been a triumphant one in Europe for supporters of new developments in scholarly publishing.

Lobbying Two European announcements have underlined that the publishing landscape is fast changing.

The first announcement took place on 9 December, when the European Commission issued a Communication on the future of European copyright reform. LERU (League of European Research Universities) immediately issued a press release to celebrate the momentous news that the Commission has promised to bring forward legislation in 2016 for a mandatory, pan-European, Exception in European copyright frameworks which will allow researchers to undertake Text and Data Mining (TDM) on all content to which they have legal access.

Text and Data Mining is a set of workflows and tools which will allow automated searching of petabytes of material to identify new linkages and meanings. For commercial journal and monograph literature, text and data mining in Europe is currently only legally possible in the UK, which has an Exception in its national laws. This is hopeless for much research, which is today undertaken by research groups across national boundaries. LERU, along with LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), has lobbied the European Commission and Parliament for years to act. On 9 December, the Commission said that it would. This means that, when legislation is passed, researchers will have legal certainty in performing text and data mining on commercial materials (to which they have lawful access) as well as Open Access materials.

The Commission's announcement, however, does not please LERU completely. The proposed Exception is restricted to academic activity, and would not empower SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) or Citizen Scientists (unattached to a university) to undertake TDM on commercial materials to which they have lawful access. LERU says in its Press Release that this must change, and that a level playing field for TDM activity should be introduced across Europe.

The second important event took place on 10 December, when Dutch universities and the publisher Elsevier issued a joint statement describing the new agreement that the Dutch have reached with this publisher from 2016. LERU immediately issued a second press release. In the agreement, Elsevier has promised that by 2018 30% of Dutch-authored papers published in a selection of Elsevier journals will be made available as Open Access without the payment of Gold Article Processing Charges (APCs). LERU has campaigned vigorously for publishers to offset APC payments against subscription costs - to support university library budgets which are under great pressure. 7500 organisations and individuals have so far signed the LERU Statement on this topic. If you would like to sign, click here .

LERU has welcomed the move by Elsevier to offset some of the articles it publishes against subscription costs, but the % is modest. LERU wants more. Professor Kurt Deketelaere, Secretary-General of LERU, says: "With this Dutch agreement on the table, I call upon the European Commission and the forthcoming Dutch EU Presidency to work with all stakeholders and bodies involved, to bring EU-wide sensible solutions to the fore. In the era of Open Science, Open Access to publications is one of the cornerstones of the new research paradigm and business models must support this transition. It should be one of the principal objectives of Commissioner Carlos Moedas and the Dutch EU Presidency (January-June 2016) to ensure that this transition happens. Further developing the EU´s leadership in research and innovation largely depends on it. Finally, this agreement must also be a signal for university associations in other countries to come to similar, preferably even better, big deals with publishers in the near future. Hopefully the negotiations in the UK and Finland in 2016 can be inspired by this first, modest, step in The Netherlands."

Well, the UK negotiations with Elsevier on a new big deal do start in 2016 and I, as chair of the JISC Electronic Information Resources Working Group, will be chairing the Elsevier Negotiating Board, with 2 UK Vice-Chancellors adding their weight to the discussions.

2016 is going to be a momentous year for the development of scholarly publishing. It will bring enormous challenges before we reach the happy position of having a mandatory pan-European Copyright Exception for TDM and the best possible UK deal, embracing OA publishing, with a major global publisher.

Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services and CEO, UCL Press