The organizations (including science funding body NWO and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) wish to make publicly funded scientific articles freely available to everyone, and the same goes for the underlying data. In three years' time, they believe, open science must be standard practice throughout the European Union.

This won't happen overnight. There is work to be done. All that raw data cannot simply be posted on the internet: just think of the privacy problems for a start. And the general reader will need some help making sense of raw data. A little bit of structuring will often be needed before data is genuinely accessible.

To address issues like these, the ten organizations involved plan to jointly establish preconditions that will enable the reuse of research data. And they want open data to be taken into consideration when the funding applications of scientists (and research groups) are being assessed: those who make their data available to everyone must be rewarded accordingly.

Finally, they want to ensure that the general public really does have access to the scientific information that is being made public. The articles and data must be easy to find and understandable.

These developments can be followed as of today at www.openscience.nl.