UK government accepts open-access recommendations

“In a fillip for supporters of open access to medical-research results, the government has accepted most of the recommendations in a working-group report on expanding access to the published findings of any research funded by the UK taxpayer. The government will take on board all bar one of the recommendations by the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings ... The working group’s report, Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications, was published on 18 June 2012... Universities and Science Minister David Willetts had already made clear when he announced the working group last September that transparency was ‘at the heart of the government’s agenda’ and ‘should apply to published research’. The government wanted the best value out of UK innovation, in line with its broader economic-growth agenda, and that meant maximising access to and use of research findings, Willetts said. The Finch report recognised that a number of different channels for communicating research results would remain important over the next few years. At the same time, it recommended a clear policy direction towards support for ‘gold’ open-access publishing ... The report also called for extensions to current licensing arrangements in the higher education, health and other sectors; improvements to the infrastructure of research repositories; and support for the moves by publishers to provide free access to their global research journals through public libraries... The working group’s recommendations were also welcomed by Research Councils UK, which has issued its own policy on open access, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which is developing proposals to make open-access published research the basis for the Research Excellence Framework after 2014. Under the ‘gold’ open-access agenda, Research Councils in the UK will award block grants to establish institutional funds, allowing for payment of APCs and facilitating ‘the immediate and competitive open publication of research findings on an unrestricted public access basis’, the government noted.”