Politics and OA key to academic future | The Bookseller

Open Access (OA) and the political climate will be the main influences on academic publishing in the next few years, according to speakers at the fair yesterday (9th April). During  'Academic Publishing: The Next Five Years', Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said while the research base was getting stronger, the 2015 General Election could see little change to austerity plans, which would have a direct impact on funding for Higher Education (HE) and a knock-on effect for publishers. 'If [funding] is unprotected, it will be part of the conversation of cuts,' Hillman warned. 'If Labour is successful and changes tuition fees, then all things being equal, that will mean less money for HE.' At 'Beyond Open Access: What Next for Academic Publishing?', Sam Burridge, m.d. of Open Research at Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan said: 'OA is now mainstream in most areas: 51% of our scholarly output in journals is now OA. We have to look at how it extends to areas where the funding is not present in the same way, like social sciences.' Cameron Neylon, advocacy director at the Public Library of Science, warned publishers had to change their infrastructures. '[Previous digital publishing models have] been set up to mean the person who pays gets access to the material. We have to look at the best way of distributing it as widely as possible,' he said.