Copernicus Publications signs the Hague Declaration
Copernicus Publications has signed the Hague Declaration on knowledge discovery in the digital age. The Hague Declaration was developed under the leadership of LIBER (the Association of European Research Libraries) and aims to foster agreement about how to best enable access to facts, data, and ideas.
As an open-access publisher, Copernicus Publications supports the call of the Hague Declaration for the removal of barriers that prevent increased and more equal access to data.
To foster the reuse and discoverability of scientific output, Copernicus offers obstacle-free access for humans and machines to its content. In November 2014, Copernicus Publications adopted an XML-first workflow and provides almost all articles of its 38 open-access journals in full-text XML, independently of a certain format or publication medium. This is in line with the goals of the Hague Declaration as machine-readable content facilitates content mining and is a key feature of enabling open science.
“We believe in open science as a principle,” says Martin Rasmussen, Managing Director of Copernicus Publications. “In our threefold open-access strategy we offer free access to the paper, to the review process, and to the assets. We see the outcome of scientific work as a publication cluster. Data sets, model code, videos, and other assets group belong to a journal article, and we strongly encourage our authors to publish these assets, too.”
Rasmussen is convinced that openness increases transparency, promotes better-quality research, and enables new scientific findings by overcoming disciplinary boundaries through the facilitation of data-driven innovation: “Enabling full reuse of the scientific content in combination with liberal licences reveals the full beauty of open access.”
Further information on the Hague Declaration.