UK to make publicly funded research free to read - science-in-society - 09 December 2011 - New Scientist

"All scientific research funded by British taxpayers will be made available online free of charge, according to a government report published earlier this week. And it doesn't stop there – the government intends the website, to be named Gateway to Research, to eventually incorporate research funded by other bodies. Much of the high-energy physics research community currently uses a system of open-access online publishing, and Janet Finch, former vice-chair of Keele University, UK, has been charged with investigating how the UK might set up something similar for all its taxpayer-funded science. The arxiv.org website, an online repository set up in 1991, offers almost all high-energy physics research for free. Despite this, established physics journals have reported no decrease in subscriptions....British science minister David Willetts suggests that peer-reviewed journals could become open-access by charging their contributors, rather than their readers. "One of the clear options is to shift from a system in which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish," he says. "But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish." ..."