*With apologies for cross-posting*

Dear colleagues,

Please see below some information I believe may be of interest to readers of this list.

The full press release is available below and also on the EDP Sciences news page - https://bit.ly/3aygmZL

For any questions, please contact Charlotte Van Rooyen, Head of Marketing and Communications, EDP Sciences, charlotte.vanrooyen@edpsciences.org

Thank you for your attention.

Maria Campbell

Marketing Communications Manager

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EDP Sciences publishing statement in response to COVID-19 pandemic

Paris, France 31 March 2020: In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a publisher which has always put the academic community at the forefront of everything we do, we have decided to open our journals content from 2018-2020 so it is freely available for all to read*.

The reasons for this are two-fold:

1. Medical research – ensuring there is nothing within our pay-walled content that could be useful for current research related to the crisis.

2. To support the many thousands of academics and researchers who are now confined to working from home and may not have easy access to key research articles from their institutions.

Agnès Henri, Managing Director, EDP Sciences, said: “The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is creating huge challenges for us all in the scholarly community. We know access to content will be severely disrupted during this time which is why we want to offer our support by freeing up our content to researchers during this extraordinary time.”

For nearly 10 years, EDP Sciences has actively supported open access (OA) and the dissemination of science through measures including:

- Publishing a number of fully OA journals; 52% of articles published in 2019 were open access

- Helping journals to transition to open access and support the principles of open science (open access, open peer review, open data and open code)

- Offering generous policies regarding embargo of subscription content

- Not requiring any embargos for depositing pre-prints into institutional and subject repositories

- Negotiating a number of transformative agreements to support the transition from subscription models to OA

- Adopting and developing a number of OA initiatives including Subscribe to Open and Liberty APCs

- Supporting the waiver of OA fees through our Research4Life programme

- Supporting a number of organisations which champion open access including OA Switchboard, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), ScienceOpen and OASPA

- Signing the Wellcome coordinated statement on sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

Content will initially be made available from 30 March until the end of June 2020. We will continually monitor the situation and question any activity which may indicate abuse of the initiative. Copyright on individual articles will remain unchanged.

*A few exceptions remain:

- Journals we publish on behalf of partners from whom we have not yet received permission; these will be added as and when we receive authorisation

- Journals we do not own for which we simply host content

ENDS

For more information please contact:

Charlotte Van Rooyen, Head of Marketing and Communications, EDP Sciences, Phone: +33 7 83 81 12 04