Reform Academic Publishing to Unblock Innovation - UK Day One

"The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should implement “Plan U”, mandating the publication of all taxpayer-funded research as “preprints” before they are submitted to academic journals. The Minister should also lead collective bargaining with academic publishers on behalf of universities to reduce costs and encourage reform. UK Research and Innovation’s “open access” policy should be modified to accept the publication of preprints as compliance.

The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should instruct UKRI to immediately stop supporting “open access block grants” to universities, which are currently costing  £40 million annually and are used to pay “article processing charges” to academic publishers. £10 million of this funding should be diverted annually to provide direct support to not-for-profit preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms. The remaining £30 million annually should be used to realise cost-savings for DSIT."