In the Dutch national newspaper nrc.next an article appeared with the title "Scientist, you don't own your data". The Dutch national science foundation NWO has made it compulsory for researchers to publish their research data if they receive NWO funding. NWO is Netherlands biggest funder of scientific research with a yearly budget of over 500 million Euro.

Ron Dekker, Director for Institutes at NWO is quoted saying "Scientists mistakingly believe they own the research data, but those data are also ours, at least in part. And we want to make that data available to everyone. That way we can spread out the benefit of costly research across multiple stakeholders and we open up the possibility of interesting follow-up research re-using the same data."

Compulsory open access to not just articles but also research data has been added to the funding requirements.

Director Peter Doorn of DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) welcomes NWO's step. DANS collects research data and makes it digitally available. "This step by NWO is really helpful." "In exact sciences sharing data is much more common, in other fields like social sciences still less so."

NWO would also like to see that researchers no longer sign away copyrights to the magazines they publish in, and wants to encourage licensing content to magazines. Leading scientific magazines routinely demand copyrights being signed over to them. "It means we will have to fight commercial publishers that want to maintain their current business model on this.", says Dekker.