Free access to British scientific research within two years

“The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world. In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years. The move reflects a groundswell of support for ‘open access’ publishing among academics who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research behind online paywalls. ‘If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn't be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it,’ Willetts said. ‘This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we should see this fully feeding through.’ He said he thought there would be ‘massive’ economic benefits to making research open to everyone. Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published. British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay ‘article processing charges’ (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article... More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the ‘academic spring’. The government's decision is outlined in a formal response to recommendations made in a major report into open access publishing led by Professor Dame Janet Finch ... Further impetus to open access is expected in coming days or weeks when the Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasizes the need for research articles to be freely available when they are submitted for the Research Excellence Framework, which is used to determine how much research funding universities receive. The Finch report strongly recommended so-called ‘gold’ open access, which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets... ‘There is a genuine value in academic publishing which has to be reflected and we think that is the case for gold open access, which includes APCs,’ Willetts told the Guardian. ‘There is a transitional cost to go through, but it's overall of benefit to our research community and there's general acceptance it's the right thing to do. We accept that some of this cost will fall on the ring-fenced science budget, which is £4.6bn. In Finch's highest estimation that will be 1% of the science budget going to pay for gold open access, at least before we get to a new steady state, when we hope competition will bring down author charges and universities will make savings as they don't have to pay so much in journal subscriptions,’ he added. ‘The real economic impact is we are throwing open, to academics, researchers, businesses and lay people, all the high quality research that is publicly funded. I think there's a massive net economic benefit here way beyond any £50m from the science budget,’ Willetts said...”