Editorial - Setting the default to open

“Make openness the default for research — to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives” is one of the mottos of this year’s International Open Access Week. Looking back to its first edition in 2008, and this newsletter’s first issue in October 2011, it is striking how widely open access has been accepted as the road to take in scholarly communication. But also that by now it has become part of the wider endeavour of open science, the shift to openness and transparency in all stages of the research process – spanning themes as diverse as FAIR and open data, open source, public engagement and citizen science, and responsible metrics in research evaluation.

In this issue, this is eloquently argued by computational linguist Martijn Wieling, vice-chairman of KNAW’s De Jonge Akademie, with whom we discussed how universities can support open science. But we also cover new developments regarding open access as such. From 2020 onwards, publication in ‘pure gold’ open access journals will be required by a group of European research funders (including NWO), who launched ‘Plan S’ a few weeks ago. Green open access will get a boost with the national pilot to take advantage of the recent ‘Taverne amendment’ to Dutch copyright law. And finally, the University of Groningen Press joined the growing number of new university presses in the Association of European University Presses.

On the theme of visibility and metrics, this issue’s highlights are the guest lectures and workshops by British impact expert Nicol Keith, and the inclusion of ORCID-IDs on every researcher’s profile page.