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of productivity is more than 50% above the world average.[1] Moreover, citations to UK articles increased between 2006 and 2010 by 7.2% a year, faster than the world average of 6.3%. Hence the UK share of global citations rose from 10.5% to 10.9%; and its share of the top 1% of most-highly-cited papers was second only to the US, at 13.8% in 2010.[2]
4.4. It is notable also that the UK research base is highly mobile: there is considerable movement both to and from the UK, and part of the explanation for the UK’s success is that it attracts internationally-mobile researchers. UK researchers are also more likely than those in almost any other major research nation to collaborate with colleagues overseas: almost half (46%) of the articles published by UK authors in 2010 included a non-UK author.
Communication and Access Routes
4.5. A report in 2011 estimated that universities in the UK spent £112m on subscriptions to journals, a further £52m on managing and providing access to them, and £11m on article processing charges for open access journals.[3] For the UK as a whole, expenditure on subscriptions is estimated to be £150m. For individual universities and other institutions, the expenditure on such items represents a major element in their total expenditure on libraries. Indeed, other elements of library expenditure have been squeezed in order to sustain journal subscriptions, in a context where library budgets as a whole have been under pressure. The proportion of overall university expenditure devoted to libraries fell from 3.5% in the mid-1990s to 2.7% in 2009. Nevertheless, the figures represent a small fraction of the UK’s total expenditure on research and development (£25.9bn in 2009-10) or of Government expenditure (£10.4bn) or even of the expenditure of the Research Councils and Higher Education Funding Councils (£5.5bn).[4]
4.6. In return for these expenditures, access to the research literature is provided via a number of routes. The great majority of journals are still published under the subscription model, and access requires the purchase of a licence. Licences are also required for access free at the point of use to e-books, while print books are of course purchased. Other routes include various PPV or transactional mechanisms; and material that is available in open access journals or via repositories.
4.7. The growth of provision to underpin open access – both through repositories and through open access journals – has been significant over the past decade; but it is
- ↑ It should be noted that it is sometimes argued that high rates of research productivity in the leading research countries are achieved in part by establishing dependency cultures in other countries.
- ↑ ibid
- ↑ Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications. RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK and JISC, 2011.See also Annex E to this report. In addition to these costs, the UK also incurs significant costs in peer review of published articles. An earlier report—Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, RIN 2008—estimated that the time spent by UK peer reviewers in 2007 represented a cash cost of £165m.
- ↑ SET Statistics 2011, Department for Business Innovation and Skills.
