Who says the EU is always bad???

IN 2021, research funded by the European Union Horizon Programme will have to fulfil requirements very important for (at least) all EU citizens.

The directive about Exploitation and Open science in Horizon Europe, in fact, clearly states, among other things, that (if the list seems obscure, just jump to the end!):

• Reporting will include.. enhanced sections for Intellectual Property (IP) management and open science
• Scientific publications financed by the programme should be “licensed under CC BY (or equivalent); CC BY-NC/ND(or equivalent)
• Metadata licensed under CC0 or equivalent, in line with FAIR principles(particularly machine-actionable)
• Only publication fees (if any) in full open access venues for peer-reviewed scientific publications are eligible for reimbursement
• Projects generating research data MUST manage their data responsibly and in line with FAIR principles
• Open access to research data must be “as open as possible, [only] as closed as necessary”,

What this actually means, in plain English:

“Open Access” means, more or less, publishing research results in ways and places freely accessible by everybody, without paying any fees. “CC BY” and “CC BY-NC/ND” are Creative Commons Licenses, that allow everybody to reuse and republish a paper, or other materials.

So, in plain English, here is what those rules mean:

A never too big, but a bit bigger than before part of all the tax money paid by all EU citizens and companies will produce more scientific reports and data freely verifiable, and freely reusable for further research by everybody, for the common good.

And if this does not seems a good deal, I am sorry, because it really is.