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The recent meeting on 22-24 November 2007 of the Competitiveness European Council meeting adopted its conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation.

The conclusions underline the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically viable circumstances, including delayed open access. They also ask the member countries "to systematically assess conditions that affect access to scientific information", including:
a.The way in which researchers exercise their copyright on scientific articles;
b.The level of investments in the dissemination of scientific information as compared to total investments in research, and
c. The use of financial mechanisms to improve access, such as refunding VAT for digital journal subscriptions to libraries.

But the Slovenian Minister for Growth, Ziga Tur, considered the conclusions as coming too late, explaining in his blog: "The bottom line is that in the scientific publishing process there is a decreasing value added by the publishers. The research is funded by the governments or the industry, performed by the researchers, papers are written and reviewed by them for free, only at the very end a publisher comes along that takes over the copyright, publishes the work and sells the journal at great expense to the community that created and edited the content for free."

He also considers that the document aims too low, in talking only about "delayed open access" and suggesting refunding VAT that would mean "simply subsidizing commercial publishers".

The Slovenian Ministry suggests a much more categorical European approach to the open access issues considering that "the explosion of the internet based technologies in the US have been made possible by the (1) open access to software, (2) open standards and (3) freely available scientific articles on the subject. The cited document brings nothing like that to Europe."

Council Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation - 2832nd Competitiveness (Internal market, Industry and Research) Council meeting (22-23.11.2007)
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/intm/...

Council on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Too Little Too Late (27.11.2007)
http://zturk.blogactiv.eu/archives/4

Latest EU steps in the field of scientific publishing 'too little, too late' (29.11.2007)
http://www.euractiv.com/en/science/latest-eu-steps-field-scientific-pu...