BBC News - Report calls on government to back open access science

“A report by Dame Janet Finch argues that there is a powerful "moral" case for publicly funded research to be freely available. Dame Janet also states that there could be considerable economic benefits if industry has free access to research... According to Dame Janet, ‘everyone agrees that greater open access would bring huge economic and public benefits. The challenge though is how we move to this model without damaging UK research, peer review or scientific publishers?" ... The report's conclusion is that the government should encourage research funders, scientists and journal publishers to back the open access model playing an increasingly important role in scientific publishing. Although open access journals currently account for just 10% of published research it is an area that Dame Finch wants to see expanding rapidly... ‘The long term future lies with open access,’ she said at a news conference to launch her report. ‘It will continue to grow fast. We need to embrace this change and do so in a measured way.’ One of Dame Janet's recommendations is to require the funders of research to set aside £60 million each year to pay the administrative fees for publication in open access publications. Mr Willetts said ... after an initial reading he said it seemed to have struck a ‘sensible balance in safeguarding the very important role of academic publishers while finding a way to manage the change to an environment that is more dominated by open access’. Many scientists are strong supporters of open access publishing. Among them is Prof Elizabeth Fisher, a world class neuroscientist at University College London. ‘At my institution we are lucky enough to have access to many journals. But inevitably myself or one of my colleagues occasionally needs to see something that we haven't subscribed to and so we have to pay a fee to see research that has been publicly funded. So it would be tremendously useful for our research if we didn't have to think twice about this sort of thing’".