Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister | Science | guardian.co.uk

"The [UK] government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals. The policy is in the government document Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth published on Monday....The commitment to making publicly funded research free to access is a direct challenge to the business models of the big academic publishing companies, which are the gatekeepers for the majority of high-quality scientific research....Dame Janet Finch, a former vice chancellor of Keele University, has been asked by Willetts to investigate how a similar open-access scheme [similar to SCOAP3] might work in the UK....Finch is expected to report in the first half of 2012 but, meanwhile, Willetts said the UK research councils would be reminded that research papers from the work they fund should be as widely available as possible...."