Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/Introduction

Introduction

This report has been produced by a working group made up of representatives of the higher education sector, research funders, the research community, learned societies, publishers, and libraries. The group’s work was funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, and the Publishers Association. But its terms of reference required it to operate independently of all four sponsors, and with its own secretariat. The group’s remit has been to examine how to expand access to the peer-reviewed publications that arise from research undertaken both in the UK and the rest of the world, with a particular focus on articles published in scholarly journals (henceforth in this report we shall use the term ‘journal’ to cover any serial publication that publishes peer-reviewed articles reporting on research and its results in any discipline); and to propose a programme of action to that end.

The group has adopted an evidence-based approach to its work in appraising the current research communications landscape in general, and issues of access in particular. Our aim has been to identify key goals and guiding principles in a period of transition towards wider access, and then to find ways both to speed that transition and to sustain during the process what is valuable in a complex ecology with many different agents and stakeholders. The future development of an effective research communications system is too important to leave to chance. Shifts to enable more people have ready access to more of the results of research will bring many benefits. But realising those benefits in a sustainable way will require co-ordinated action by funders, universities, researchers, libraries, publishers and other intermediaries in the information landscape.