Multiple Sclerosis Research: Journal of British Research

“Apparently the government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shake up of academic publishing since the invention of the internet... It is suggested that there is a need for research articles to be freely available when they are submitted for the Research Excellence Framework ... The academic spring is being led by people who have no concept of medical academia as their papers will be low impact factor anyway and so less important for their REF returns ... You can not change the insitutions over night and UK academics will probably suffer from this.  The solution will be to pay the journals to have the papers open access, this could be around £2,000-£5,000 each. Much of the medical research done in the UK is not funded via the UK government. Publishing will become an expensive business for Dr. vD:-). The research councils are probably not going to shell out thousands extra for their PhD students. In addition the charities are not going to want to fund this. If you have negative data will you want to publish it?, maybe not if it is going to cost thousands. If you have poorly funded academics they are going to have problems paying for the publications. Also will the Universities have to pay twice, once to publish and again to access the other articles in the journals written by academics outside the UK? My guess is yes and the publishers must be rubbing their hands. Maybe the Government should set up an open access journal and make all British University Research be published in it-I can see it now the Journal of British Research. I think the Wellcome Trust is planning on an ejournal so maybe let them do it.....and pay for it. Under the new scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world... If there was a Journal of British Research would Amercians be bothered to read it. This is why British authors often attempt to publish in International journals, to give themselves international status. Before the Internet it was the case that American scientists seldom cited work from non-US journals, as if the work did not exist. However, the problem is that the UK output to global research is small and so the rest of the World will not care what the British force on the British... “