Open and Shut?: The UK Publishers Association comments on the Finch Report

Use the link to access the transcript of the interview introduces as follows: “The eagerly awaited Finch Report was published on 18th June. The Finch Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded. After due deliberation, the Committee concluded that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional journal model — which currently sees most research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be gradually discontinued. The Finch Report has been welcomed by publishers and their trade associations (e.g.here, here and here), and by research funders (e.g. here and here).  However, it has been received with a mixture of frustration, disbelief, and anger by some UK research universities, and by many OA advocates (e.g. here, here and here). What has dismayed critics is that in recommending the so-called gold route to OA (where researchers pay to publish in OA journals), rather than the green route(where they continue to publish in subscription journals at no cost, and then self-archive their papers in an institutional repository) the Finch Report appears to have condemned the research community to having to find an additional £50-60 million a year to publish its research, at a time when university budgets are under severe pressure. Since much of this additional money is expected to go into the pockets of publishers, some have charged the Finch Committee with succumbing to lobbying. Others maintain that if the Finch recommendations are implemented the number of research papers published will have to be rationed. What do publishers make of the criticisms? To find out, I contacted Graham Taylor, Director of Educational, Academic and Professional Publishing at the UK-based Publishers Association...”