Towards Open Access by default in Spain – The Spanish State Plan for Research, Development and Innovation has been published

In January 2018, Spanish Government published the State Plan for Research, Development and Innovation 2017-2020 that includes important news on open access to scientific publications and research data. The State Plan is the main instrument of the State Government for developing and achieving those objectives set at the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020, and at the Europe 2020 Strategy. The funding priorities included in the National Plan are granted through competitive calls for projects funding, launched on a yearly basis.
The State Plan for 2017-2020, as well as that corresponding to the 2013-2016 period, is made up by four programs that correspond to the general objectives established in the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020: promotion of talent and its employability, generation of knowledge and strengthening of the system, business leadership in R&D&I, and research oriented towards the challenges of society. However, The State Plan for 2017-2020 includes three key elements for paving the way of Spanish R&D system towards Open Science:

The National Open Access policy is extended to research data.

The National Open Access policy for literature was launched in 2011, and it has been gaining momentum since then, thanks to the strong institutional repositories network under RECOLECTA umbrella. The National Government has included Open Access to research data in the State Plan as one of its key movements towards Open Science. It is in an initial stage; therefore it is so far not a compulsory but a voluntary mandate that is sending the right message to the institutional repositories of Universities and research centers, which are starting to build up their research data archiving infrastructures.

Digital skills in pre-doctoral phase for applying open access to publications and research data are acknowledged.

This is an important step forward open science, since it inoculates the new paradigm of disseminating and communicating research results into the youngest generation, thus guaranteeing a blue sky in the implementation of the new scientific model.

A periodic evaluation of the open access policy to publications compliance level will be made.

This indicator is intended to be part of the evaluation of the State Plan success. Therefore, the National Government is linking its whole scientific policy evaluation to the open access policy success.

Recommendations for the full implementation of the national policy on Open Access

The Monitoring Commission for the implementation of article 37 on Open Access Dissemination of the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation Act, continuing with the work it has been carrying out, believes the following recommendations should be followed by universities, research centres and entities subscribed to scientific journals.

1. Monitoring compliance with open access publishing
2. Optimizing archiving
3. Focusing on researchers regarding OA and new indicators
4. Reducing journal costs
5. Transparency in journal subscription agreements and control mechanisms

Leaflet: complete description of Recommendations