EU Ministers responsible for research, development and innovation meet regularly to discuss issues of European competitiveness and the associated joint tasks. Items on the agenda of the Brussels meeting included the ex-post evaluation of the FP7 framework programme, with a future outlook based on the running results of the ongoing Horizon 2020 framework programme; conclusions on innovation friendly European regulation as well as the transition towards an open science system including the need for disseminating open access.

A key objective of the Dutch EU Presidency is to bring the Member States together on open access to scientific results but, as it has become obvious, there is still a long way to go. According to a recent study of the European Commission, only five EU countries – including Hungary –supported the so-called „golden” open access, a progressive way meaning that scientific publications currently available upon subscription become freely available to all. Nowadays everything is in place for such a change: with the availability of increasingly powerful digital technologies and the globalization of the scientific community, access to information seems easier than ever. Providing open access to and reusing scientific results of publicly funded research is an inevitable step towards a paradigm shift known as open science to fundamentally transform the modus operandi of doing research and organizing science.

One of the most reasonable and efficient ways for doing this would be to redeploy the money currently spent on subscription fees by publishing organizations to publication costs of their contents made available on freely accessible forums, pointed out József Pálinkás as an invited speaker in the debate on this. According to the President of the NRDI Office, the open access initiative cannot be successful without the scientific community adopting open access as an alternative to traditional publication models.

The main problem in this regard is that, given the current evaluation methodology that underpins research funding, the transition to open access may harm the interests of individual researchers. For this reason József Pálinkás, who himself has been an active researcher for decades, believes that a shift towards open access approach requires a comprehensive renewal of research evaluation methodology. Scientific performance evaluation underpinning funding decisions should be based on openly accessible publications, but all this needs joint efforts by the research institutes, the governments and the research funding organizations of the Member States, the President of the NRDI Office commented. While it is an encouraging sign that the participants of the Competitiveness Council supported the ideas on the whole, they also emphasized their need for gradual introduction and Member State autonomy in practical implementation.

Contribution by József Pálinkás starts at min. 53 of the video