UK open-access route too costly, report says : Nature News & Comment

"The route to open-access publishing endorsed by the British government puts unacceptable strains on research budgets at a time of funding shortages, says a parliamentary report released today. The report also argues for more transparency and competition in the costs of publishing research. The report, from the House of Commons’ Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee, is the latest salvo in a heated international fight about how to afford the shift to a worldwide system of open-access publishing. It is an issue on which the UK had set a radical stance, hoping to drag other nations along its path. In July 2012, the UK government said that money should be taken from research funding to pay publishers so that UK papers be immediately free to read. The hope was that this ‘gold’ form of open-access would, ultimately, spread across the world, with other nations eventually also paying to make their own papers free. Until that day, however, the United Kingdom would find its budget stretched: both paying fees to publish its own research, and also continuing to pay library subscriptions so as to read non-open-access journals.  In contrast, most other funding agencies — including in the United States and Europe — argue that researchers should instead be told to make their papers publicly accessible in an online repository, often after a delay of 6–12 months from publication — the so-called 'green' open access. Under those guidelines, researchers can publish in gold open-access journals if they want to, either using research grants or selecting government-backed free journals — but that is their choice.  A June 2012 UK government-funded study, the Finch Report,argued that pushing forward the gold open access transition — involving yearly extra costs of some £50 million–60 million on top of an existing £175 million — was worth the budgetary pain, because it accelerated the day when the subscription system would be abandoned and all research papers would be made immediately free.  But other librarians and universities argued that the UK policy was an expensive way to reach universal open access, needlessly increasing publisher profits.  The report published today sides against the government view. 'The evidence suggests that the costs of unilaterally adopting gold open access during a transition period are much higher than those of green open access,' said Adrian Bailey, the chair of the committee, in a statement emailed to reporters. 'At a time when the budgets of universities are under great pressure, it is unacceptable that the Government has issued an open-access policy that will require considerable subsidy from research budgets,' Bailey added.  Instead, the report says, the government has neglected the role of repositories and green open access.  'One could hardly have hoped for a better outcome,' says Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Quebec in Montreal and a long-time campaigner for green open access.  'The report strikes a very important balance between the importance and value of repositories as a mechanism for increasing access and the potential for a fully-funded open-access research communication system,' says Cameron Neylon, director of advocacy at the San Francisco-based Public Library of Science, an open-access publisher.  But not everyone agrees with the Committee’s argument for green open access. 'We believe that to achieve the shift away from the outdated subscription system, funders must back gold open access now and recognise the cost of publication as an integral part of the cost of funding research,' says Robert Kiley, who is in charge of implementing open-access policy at the Wellcome Trust in London.  In reality, however, adds Adam Tickell, Provost and vice-principal at the University of Birmingham, the UK’s policy has already been much softened from the government’s stance last year — thanks in part to heated debates as evidence was taken for the Committee report earlier this year.  For example, Research Councils UK (RCUK) had mandated that this year, 45% of UK research had to be gold open access, but its stance has now been changed to require gold or green, with the choice up to researchers.

Despite the government’s and RCUK’s insistence that there is a preference for gold open access, 'there is de facto no preference for gold over green at all', Tickell says — 'although the government would never formally say this', he adds. 'Almost every university is operating on the basis that they will be compliant if their research is published green open access,' he says.  'The reason we have set a clear preference for gold open access is to make sure we do not lose sight of the ultimate destination. But we agree green has an important part to play and have adopted a 'mixed economy' approach for now,' a spokesperson for BIS told