“Three central arguments support this transformation: 1 ? Openly accessible publications can be read, reviewed and used more quickly and more widely by other researchers. This increases the quality of research and accelerates scientific progress. 2 ? OA makes scientific knowledge more widely available outside of the scientific community and lowers the threshold for various transfer activities. This increases the social effectiveness of (publicly funded) research. 3 ? Up to now, the business model of publishers has been based on rights of use. As they will no longer be granted exclusive rights under OA, publishers will become publication service providers and will compete with other providers. This may strengthen the negotiating position of scientific institutions vis-à-vis such service providers and improve the innovative capacity, cost transparency and cost efficiency of the publication system.
As far as the Council is concerned, the goal of the transformation is for academic publications to be made freely available immediately, permanently, at the original publication venue and in the citable, peer-reviewed and typeset version of record under an open licence (CC BY). This so-called gold route to OA (gold OA) is compatible with various business models….
For orientation in this market, the Council recommends that the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany agree on common requirements for quality assurance of content (especially in terms of peer review processes) as well as for high-quality publication services. In the medium term, academic publications should not only be openly accessible, but also machine-readable through open, structured formats and semantic annotations….
“Gold OA” should not be equated with funding via article processing charges (APC)….
As the WR sees it, all third-party funders are obliged to fully finance the publication costs arising from publishing the results of the research they are funding….”