The European Union Competitiveness Council met on 27th May in Brussels. Following the meeting, it made a major announcement that by 2020 all scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible. EU ministers responsible for research and innovation made a unanimous decision to carry out this significant step which is to get the best possible use out of research data. Mr Dekker, Chairman of the group, said “The time for talking about open access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice.”

At the moment, the results of publicly funded research are not available outside universities and institutions. By 2020, scientific papers publishing the results of publicly funded research must be freely available to access. Additionally, the research data must be available to reuse, unless there are good reasons against this eg. privacy.