UK Going Open Access

“Britain will be a land of open access, if the United Kingdom government’s strategy to freely disseminate publicly funded research comes to fruition. The UK’s Science Minister David Willets announced the plan in an opinion piece that ran inThe Guardian newspaper on Tuesday (May 1). He formally laid out the plan at a meeting of the UK Publishers Association today (May 2)... The UK government is enlisting the help of a University of Manchester sociologist Dame Janet Finch and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to help devise an open access strategy that will least rankle academic publishers, who depend upon money brought in from subscriptions to scholarly journals. Willets outlined two open access models that might be employed by the UK: the ‘gold’ model, in which project funders cover publishing costs, and the ‘green’ model, where commercial publishers recoup peer review and publication costs for a certain period of closed access before releasing content into the public domain. The UK’s Wellcome Trust already requires the research it funds to be deposited in open access repositories. And the US National Institutes of Health has a similar policy that mandates public access to its grantees work within 12 months of publication in peer-reviewed journals.”