Answer given by Ms Gabriel on behalf of the European Commission

1. The Commission does not currently have the legal framework to address the monitoring practices of scientific publishers when researchers and their institutions formally agree to make use of the data analytical services of these publishers under their terms.

2. The issues described above are not likely to fall under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) since the aim of the DMA is to promote or restore contestability and fairness in digital markets. The DMA does not serve other, more societal policy goals such as scientific freedom or research support.

3. The Commission took actions to support the creation and supply of services to enable the digital transition of science and to diversify the scientific publishing ecosystem. The European Open Science Cloud, which was launched in November 2019, will progressively provide a scientific commons for research data through an open infrastructure which will enable European researchers to work together across borders and scientific disciplines. This includes actions to develop tools and services to underpin a research assessment system that incentivises open science practices. Flexibility will be integrated in these developments to allow research-performing and research-funding organisations to set their own recruitment and evaluation policies. The Commission services also support the Open Research Europe (ORE) Platform, to be launched in March 2021, which is a free, open access, peer-review publishing venue for the publication of results stemming from EU-funded research.