Ethical Aspects of Open Access Workshop: A Windy Road

The ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics organised the workshop Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road on 1 February 2018, hosted by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels.

For anyone involved in academia, Open Access has become a topic hard to miss. The European Commission’s Open Science agenda as well as funding and research organisations alike encourage the open publication of research articles on an ever greater scale and with good reason as there is little doubt that publicly funded research should be as open as possible to the public.

Though, after around 15 years since the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, one of the most influential statements on Open Access, the research community must attest that several unintended consequences and ethical conundrums have marred the full-scale implementation of Open Access in the European Research Area.

ALLEA workshop

To identify some of these issues and to discuss possible solutions, the ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics organised the workshop Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road on 1 February 2018, hosted by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels. The event was attended by around 80 participants from across Europe.

The speakers of the workshop covered issues ranging from editorial responsibilities in the Open Access world to ways of identifying questionable and unethical publishers.

The speakers of the workshop covered issues ranging from editorial responsibilities in the Open Access world to ways of identifying questionable and unethical publishers. Further issues that were addressed were the need to balance transparency with resilience and the effects of Open Access on the assessments of research performance. Relevant organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and EMBO were among the represented organisations.

The workshop was concluded with a panel debate, bringing together representatives from European academies, young academies, funding organisations, European universities, and the European Research Council.

The presentations of the workshop are available on the ALLEA website here.

A more detailed report of the workshop will be published in due course.