End UKRI support for open access publishing | Times Higher Education (THE)

"Scientists supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grants should be required to release their research as a preprint rather than receiving additional money to publish it open access, according to a report. 

Arguing for reforms that would deliver “significant savings” and “accelerate scientific progress”, a report published by the thinktank UK Day One calls on the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to mandate UKRI-funded research to be published as preprints prior to submission to academic journals, and end direct support for open access journal publication, which is currently about £40 million a year.

It draws attention to the “Plan U” programme introduced in March by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has stopped providing funding towards article processing charges for open access publication.

The Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation has also adopted a similar Plan U policy and donated £4.5 million in 2022 to two leading preprints – bioRxiv and medRxiv – to support its work up to 2024.

Using just a quarter of the £40 million that UKRI gives to funded projects to pay for article processing charges, the UK’s main research funder could provide £10 million in direct support for non-profit preprint servers or post-publication peer review sites such as PubPeer, says the UK Day One report published on 5 September...."