Dreadful Daily Mail article on UK Finch Report on Open Access

1. The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research. 2. The Finch Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act (RWA) -- since discredited and withdrawn -- failed to get done: to push the Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, too boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review -- and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward Gold OA publishing, at the publishers' pace and price. 3. The result would be very little OA, very slowly, and at a high Gold OA price, taken out of already scarce UK research funds, instead of the rapid and cost-free OA growth vouchsafed by Green OA mandates from funders and universities. 4. Both the loss in UK's Green OA mandate momentum and the expenditure of further funds to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA would be a major historic (and economic) set-back for the UK, which has until now been the worldwide leader in OA. The UK would, if the Fitch Report were heeded, be left behind by the EU (which has mandated Green OA for all research it funds) and the US (which has a Bill in Congress to do the same -- the same Bill that the recently withdrawn RWA Bill tried to counter). 5. The UK already has 40% Green OA -- twice as much as the rest of the world. Rather than heeding the Finch Report, which has so obviously fallen victim to the publishing lobby, the UK should shore up and extend its cost-free Green OA funder and institutional mandates to make them more effective and mutually reinforcing, so that UK Green OA can grow quickly to 100%. 6. Publishers will adapt. In the internet era, the research publishing tail should not be permitted to wag the research dog, at the expense of the access, usage, applications, impact and progress of the research in which the UK tax-payer has invested so heavily, in increasingly hard economic times. The benefits to research of cost-free Green OA vastly outweigh the (natural) pressure to adapt to the internet era that they will exert on the publishing industry.