Call to Commitment: Petition for a fair and inclusive approach to publishing

In March 2024, during the Open Science Retreat in School (NL), a group of participants came together to discuss a new ‘narrative for sustainable Open Access’. This discussion has eventually resulted in the following Call to Commitment petition. Here is the text of the petition forwarded to us by our colleagues: 

In the coming year, several ‘read and publish’ contracts with key scientific publishers are to be renegotiated and renewed. These agreements, that have direct influence on the way we publish, are often called transformative. However, they are not transforming the publishing landscape in line with safeguarding sovereignty of researchers and equitable access to scientific research outputs.

Therefore, anyone in the research community can now sign a petition to call upon their respective institutions and national stakeholders to commit to community values and OS principles when renegotiating these contracts. The petition can be found at https://openscienceretreat.eu/call-to-commitment-future-proof-oa-publishing/.

The message of the petition entails that to stay in line with agreed community values and OS principles, we need an alternative publishing strategy that moves away from a mere focus on for-profit and non-inclusive models, towards a landscape that fully includes institutional and community-driven OA. Therefore it is crucial to redirect a significant portion of the investments currently allocated to transformative agreements, and to give the available alternatives a fair chance to demonstrate their full potential.