Major academic and scientific publishers today prepared to clash with the European Community on the day the EC policy paper Communications on Scientific Information in the Digital Age is due to be published.

It is expected that the EC will recommend that all EU funded research is to be made freely available online within six months of publication.

The publishers have signed a 10 point declaration of principals opposing the EC proposals, those signing it include Blackwell, Elsevier, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis and Wiley. All of them state that it the EC recommendations were taken up it would destroy the industries business model and have a major impact on the quality of scientific research.

They believe the six month embargo expected to be set down by the EC is too short. Stephen Barr, Sage managing director told The Bookseller, ""If everything other than the past six months is freely available, why would anyone pay for new social science journals? And if no one would pay for them, why would anyone publish them?"