The European Commission outlined measures to improve access to scientific information produced in Europe.

Therewith Europe's innovation capacity will boost and give citizens quicker access to the benefits of scientific discoveries.

As a first step the European Commission requests that all articles published as a result of EU funded research through the EU's Research and Innovation Funding Program Horizon 2020, must be openly available. This can be reached by publishing in an open access medium (gold road) or by depositing a copy of a publication in a repository (green road), no longer than six month after publication (12 months for the social sciences and humanties). The goal is for 6'% of European publicly funded research articles to be available under open access by 2016.

Furthermore the European Commission also wants to improve the access to and use of scientific data. Therefore the Commission also released recommendations for their Member States on how to reach this goal.