Access to Scientific Information (by the Inter-Academy Panel) (2013), InterAcademy Panel

What is this about?

Access to Scientific Information (2013), produced by the InterAcademy Panel, is an international framework promoting open access and open science globally. It establishes openness as the default, balanced by ethics, privacy, intellectual property, and security, linking transparency to research quality, reproducibility, and equitable access to knowledge. The guidance encourages depositing publications in trusted repositories, using Creative Commons licensing, persistent identifiers, and FAIR-aligned data management plans. Responsibilities are shared across researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers, with clear instructions on planning for openness, rights retention, funding acknowledgment, and efficient use of infrastructure. Embargoes and exceptions for sensitive or commercial data must be transparently justified. The policy emphasizes equity, zero-embargo access, multilingual communication, and publisher-agnostic routes, while prioritizing the quality of openness metadata, reproducibility, and interoperability over output counts. By consolidating international principles into a coherent reference, it provides practical guidance for implementing transparent, inclusive, and accessible scientific communication worldwide.

For whom is this important?

researchersResearch institutionsJournal publishersPolicy-makers

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