Research: It's time for universities to reclaim publishing rights

The Finch report declared, very loudly, that publicly funded research in the UK should be freely available in the public domain. In response, the research councils demonstrated some impressively swift footwork, confirming within weeks that all the research they funded should be published with open access. All this is excellent news and establishes the UK as one of the most forward-looking countries on the openness of scholarly communications. But in many ways the fundamental wrong remains. Until now, much of the open-access debate has focused on the choice between green and gold. But gold open access, where authors pay commercially run journals to make their papers freely available, is simply a different way of ceding control of publicly funded research to publishers, many of whom are, quite legitimately, determined to maximise their profits. Whether libraries pay for journal subscriptions or authors pay publication charges is irrelevant. Either way, the commercial publishers call the shots.  We are already seeing huge disparities: some of BioMedCentral’s charges are around £500, whereas the Nature Publishing Group quotes between £2,000 and £3,000 and possibly even higher for its flagship journal Nature. Is there really a more than four-fold difference in their publishing costs?

Since researchers don’t normally pay publishing charges out of their own pockets, they will still elect to publish in the journals that most benefit their reputations and careers. Thus market forces will rarely control the price.  In such an environment, the open-access fund of £10 million made available by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in September amounts to throwing good money after bad. It’s also nowhere near enough: Imperial College London’s academics publish 9,000 papers a year—you don’t need to be an accountant to work out that our share of BIS’s pocket money would fall some way short of turning our world to gold.  But this is not the only way. Maybe the real benefit of the Finch report is not that it gives us a solution—it doesn’t—but that it has sparked discussion in high places. It may make those involved in publicly funded research bold enough to turn the current scholarly communications model on its head and allow our universities to regain control of their intellectual capital by disseminating the research they produce.  Once, university presses did just this...  This is the opportunity for our top universities to create a better gold solution. Publishing skills are publishing skills. What stops us from bringing them in-house, and using the prestige of our universities as brands?  What stops us at present is the iron grip of journal impact factors ... If this were just an argument about money, we could be relatively relaxed about the snail’s pace of change. Open access will come good, gradually, but for now the publishers still have the upper hand, and our universities aren’t particularly fleet of foot.  However, there is far more at stake here than UK university library budgets. If our researchers are to continue to punch above their weight in the global ring, they need access to the widest range of resources. Better resources mean better research, and better research will help us to make the world a better place..."