The request applies to all articles published to date as well as future articles for the duration of this crisis and is fully in line with the EU’s support for “Plan S”, a European initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality.

Mariya Gabriel Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth said:

I welcome this important international initiative that underlines the vital need of working together and providing researchers in Europe and around the world access to the research and data they need. Open access is already a tangible reality in the EU. We can therefore lead by example thanks to our scientific expertise, technological development and innovation capacity, while cooperating closely with international partners.

The letter has been signed by chief science advisors, ministers and leaders from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Commission. Already 37 groups within the scholarly publishing community have answered the call to make COVID-19 research and data publicly available.

Background

The signing is part of the EU’s wide-ranging approach in the field of research and innovation to address the corona crisis, which includes the coordination of international initiatives as well as funding promising projects on rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests, new treatments and vaccines. In record time, the European Commission made available €47.5 million of emergency funding from Horizon 2020 to support 17 research projects, involving 136 teams from across the EU that have immediately started their work. Additionally, the European Commission offered up to €80 million of financial support to CureVac - a highly innovative European vaccine developer - to scale up development and production of a vaccine.

To strengthen global cooperation, the EU is coordinating international initiatives with other funders under the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Diseases Preparedness (GloPID-R), which brings together 29 funding bodies from 5 continents and the WHO. The EU is also contributing 20 million EUR to the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), and is planning to provide additional support.

The European Commission fully supports open science and open access, through initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud, which aims at developing a research ecosystem where data can be shared, processed and reused as openly as possible. Most recently, the European Commission last week awarded a contract for the establishment of an open access publishing platform, which will be available to all researchers that receive or have received funding from the EU.

More information

Letter to scholarly publishing community

EU Coronavirus response

EU Coronavirus research projects and initiatives