Government backs calls for research data to be made freely available

“The government has welcomed calls from academics and one of the world's biggest research charities for results of public and charity-funded scientific research to be made available as widely as possible in the public domain. The Wellcome Trust, which spends more than £600m on scientific research a year and is the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said this week it planned to adopt a more robust approach with the scientists it funds, to ensure scientific results are freely available within six months of first publication. ‘We will watch the Wellcome Trust's new initiatives with interest,’ said the coalition's minister for universities and science, David Willetts. ‘There are some real potential benefits from improving access to academic research. They include spreading knowledge, encouraging collaboration and facilitating technology transfer.’ Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, told the Guardian that the results of public and charity-funded scientific research should be freely available to anyone who wants to read it, for whatever purpose they need it. More than 9,000 researchers have meanwhile signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the ‘academic spring’ by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge. The majority of the world's scientific research, estimated at around 1.5m new articles a year, is published in journals owned by a small number of large publishing companies including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Scientists submit manuscripts to the journals, which are sent out for peer review before publication. The work is then available to other researchers by subscription, usually through their libraries. Publishers of the academic journals, which can cost universities up to €20,000 (£16,500) a year each to access, argue the price is necessary to sustain a high-quality peer review process... Andrew Miller, Labour chair of the House of Commons science and technology committee, said: ‘The broad principle is obviously correct, publicly funded research should be in the public domain as soon as possible.’ He added: ‘The fact that Wellcome are, at the council level, looking at this fairly clinically is valuable. I certainly would be really interested to see what they come up with. There you have a very large organisation that is manifestly funding research in the public good by virtue of its own constitution and, if they are thinking about it, it does raise rather an important question, why aren't directly-publicly-funded research bodies thinking about it?’ Research Councils UK (RCUK), the co-ordinating body for the distribution of more than £3bn of public money a year for scientific research, is also reviewing its policy on open access. Drs Astrid Wissenburg, chair of RCUK's Impact Group said it was important that the outputs from research are made as widely available as possible and pointed out that the research councils published an open access policy in 2006, which aspired to eventually place publicly funded research in the public domain. ‘We support Wellcome's approach, and we are ourselves looking at monitoring and measures to assure compliance,’ she said. ‘We are only now starting to be able to collect this data, as there was a long lead time for our policy to have an effect – it applied to research grants starting in October 2006, which ran for a few years, then to publish takes another few years.’ RCUK is now soliciting feedback on a new draft policy on open access, ‘prompted by the wider developments in this area, which included feedback from our academic community on differences between research councils in their policies...’ Willetts said that, in its innovation and research strategy, the government had already committed to deliver better access to taxpayer-funded research. ‘We are now supporting the work of [academic] Dame Janet Finch - who has brought all the key players together, including the publishers - to find ways to improve access.’ Finch is heading up the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, a working group that will propose a programme of action and make recommendations to government, research funders, publishers and other interested parties on how access to research findings and outcomes can be broadened. At the launch of the innovation strategy, Willetts outlined some of the possibilities for the future of scientific publishing. ‘One of the clear options is to shift to a system from which university libraries pay for journals to one which the academics pay to publish. But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish.’ He added: ‘We have to let [Finch], working with the publishing industry and the research councils, find a way forward. The publishing industry recognise the direction in which things are going and we have to work out a new model together.’”