Britain Announces Plan to Make Publicly Financed Research Freely Available - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Throwing its weight behind open access, the British government has declared it wants to make all research paid for with public money freely available online. If it succeeds, the move is likely to have significant consequences for publishers, and will boost the international momentum of the open-access movement. But the government won’t share details about how it will make the plan a reality. David Willetts, Britain’s minister for universities and science and a member of the Conservative Party, made the announcement today at the general meeting of the U.K. Publishers Association in London... The Chronicle talked about the Willetts announcement with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, executive vice president for corporate communications at Springer, at the spring meeting of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers, taking place May 2-3 in Washington, D.C. Mr. Merkel-Sobotta is chairman of the association’s board. Springer uses a combination of open-access and conventional business models. ‘Anything that’s good for science is fine with us,’ Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said when asked what Springer thought about the Willetts announcement. ‘My question is, What kind of business model are they going to use?’ Open access comes in many forms. One of them, so-called gold OA, ‘is just so not controversial any more,’ he said. ‘It’s a business model. And that’s all it is. And it works as a business model for certain disciplines.’ Publishers have been aware of the British government’s interest in open access for some time, Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said, and have been participating in Ms. Finch’s consultation process. ‘We’re not as well represented or as loud as the other side,’ he added. Given the lack of details so far, ‘it’s too early to say whether this will be a success,’ he said of the plan. ‘It looks like setting off fireworks, but nobody’s really sure what holiday we’re celebrating.’”