EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” The decision was taken during a meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which is made up of ministers from the EU’s member states. In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.”

The formal “conclusions” of the meeting define open access to publications as “free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.” This is taken from the key Budapest Open Access Initiative that helped to define open access back in 2002—an indication of how slow progress has been so far.

Although the open access commitment by the EU ministers has been hailed as a “major boost” for open science by the League of European Research Universities, it is a political signal, rather than a plan for implementation. The Competitiveness Council is made up of ministers from each of the EU member states, and they have now committed their respective governments to move to open access in the next four years, but there is no legal mechanism to force them to do so.

According to the final document of their meeting, the ministers have agreed to “promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020, using the various models possible and in a cost-effective way, without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes.” The embargoes refer to the widespread practice by publishers of forbidding researchers from making their work freely available, for example in an online repository, until six or even 12 months after publication. It is not clear what “as short as possible” will mean in this context.

In terms of implementation, the Competitive Council simply “invites the Commission, Member States, and relevant stakeholders, including research funding organisations, to catalyse this transition” to open access.

A background document explains: “The EU has to set common goals, but each member state will follow its own course during the transition, because the research and innovation system is different in each of them and responsibilities throughout these systems are different as well. In order to follow the progress of the transition regular monitoring should be ensured by the Competitiveness Council.”

That would seem to leave plenty of scope for national foot-dragging, not least with the encouragement of scientific publishers who are reluctant to embrace open access fully.

Even if the new policy was fully implemented across the EU, it would only apply to new research. That would still leave a huge swathe of earlier papers inaccessible without a subscription to the journals in which they appeared. The broader issue of free access to public-funded academic work finds itself at a critical juncture. Ars Technica will soon be publishing a major feature exploring the past, present, and future of open access and why we should fight for it.