The European Commission is considering a series of initiatives to promote open access publishing as part of moves to disseminate scientific information as widely as possible.

The online consultation exercise that it ran last year showed that open access aroused conflicting views, with widespread support from the scientific community but strong opposition from the publishing industry.

The commission has come down on the side of the scientific community. It maintains that publicly funded research data should, in principle, be accessible to all, and it considers that wide access to research results is important to the commission's objective …