Times Higher Education - Fools' gold?

When UK academics in the humanities and social sciences complain of 'cataclysms', 'delusional fantasies' and 'sleepwalking into disaster', you might assume they are talking about the recent removal of public funding for teaching their subjects. But there is another aspect of the government's higher education policy that is causing increasing numbers of non-science scholars to fear the worst. Twelve months ago, open access was a somewhat arcane cause, particularly outside the sciences. It was championed by a relatively small cadre of committed activists (often those associated with university libraries) outraged by years of above-inflation rises in journal subscription rates and fired by the conviction that research funded by the public should be freely accessible. The landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative - the manifesto of the open-access movement - was published in 2002, but progress on implementing it had been slow. Some open-access journals, particularly in the life sciences, had built solid reputations, and funders including Research Councils UK had encouraged the depositing of research papers in 'green' open-access repositories wherever possible. They had also committed to paying the article fees associated with publishing in some open-access journals (the 'gold' method). In 2006, the UK's Wellcome Trust introduced the requirement that all papers it funds be open access. However, compliance with the trust's mandate stood at just 55 per cent last year, and open-access advocates lamented the fact that academics' lack of direct exposure to the cost of subscribing to journals meant they had no reason to embrace the alternative. But open access was then swept up in the UK government's drive for greater access to information - partly in the hope that companies might be able to exploit research findings commercially to revive a flatlining economy. In September 2011, the government commissioned a task force to chart a way forward. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, former vice-chancellor of Keele University, the remit of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings was to forge a consensus among universities, libraries, researchers, learned societies and publishers. Typically regarded by open-access advocates as obstacles to progress, publishers had always been wary of a concerted move towards green open access for fear that it might encourage libraries to cancel journal subscriptions. They had also been slow to convert their journals to the gold model; open-access advocates claimed that this was because of their attachment to the subscription fees that delivered vast profit margins - reputedly up to 40 per cent for large commercial publishers such as Elsevier. Anger at those margins, compounded by the fact that the majority of journal editing and reviewing is carried out for free by scholars, was further stoked by some publishers' support for a bill introduced into the US Congress at the end of 2011. Known as the Research Works Act, it would have outlawed open-access mandates for publicly funded research in the country. The publisher most closely associated with the bill, Elsevier, eventually withdrew its support, but not before thousands of academics globally had followed the lead of mathematician Sir Timothy Gowers, Royal Society 2010 Anniversary research professor at the University of Cambridge, in pledging to boycott the firm ,,,"