Bet on furious lobbying to prevent this: the European Union’s Competitiveness Council has recommended all scientific papers be made “open access” by 2020.

The Dutch presidency of the EU has issued this media release explaining what’s on the table.

“From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues”, the release states.

The release says EU ministers responsible for innovation agreed unanimously on the proposal.