The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century

Currently, there is a strong push to address the apparent deficits of the scholarly communication system. Open Science has the potential to change the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge for the better, but there is no commonly shared vision that describes the system that we want to create. Between April 2015 and June 2016, members of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) working group “Open Access and Scholarly Communication” met in Vienna to discuss this matter. The main outcome of our considerations is a set of twelve principles that represent the cornerstones of the future scholarly communication system. They are designed to provide a coherent frame of reference for the debate on how to improve the current system. With this document, we are hoping to inspire a widespread discussion towards a shared vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century.