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5.7. In the UK, the Government announced in its Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth[1] in December 2011 a commitment to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge; and that it would work with partners, including the publishing industry, to achieve that goal. In the light of the discussions in the Working Group, the Research Councils are also now proposing to update and enhance their policies on open access; and the Higher Education Funding Councils are proposing to make open access a condition for the submission of published outputs for any Research Excellence Framework (REF) or similar exercise that follows the forthcoming one which will be completed in 2014.
5.8. In the light of developments such as these, it seems likely that the transition towards open access will accelerate in the next few years. The Group’s aim is to support that process, but to ensure that policies are implemented in ways that do not disrupt the essential features of a high-quality and continuously-developing research publishing ecology, or the high performance and standing of the UK research community.
Repositories
5.9. Funders’ and institutional policies relating to repositories have for the most part up to now sought to address publishers’ concerns about sustainability and risks to the viability of their journals. They do so by making reference to the restrictions imposed by copyright and other intellectual property rights, by allowing embargos on access and so on. They thus reflect a widespread acknowledgement[2] that repositories on their own do not provide a sustainable basis for a research communications system that seeks to provide access to quality-assured content; for they do not themselves provide any arrangements for pre-publication peer review. Rather, they rely on a supply of published material that has been subject to peer review by others; or in some cases they provide facilities for comments and ratings by readers that may constitute a more informal system of peer review once the material has been deposited and disseminated via the repository itself.
5.10. The restrictions imposed by publishers seem to have succeeded so far in limiting any potential impact on take-up of subscriptions to their journals. The National Science and Technology Council in the US notes that since the introduction of the NIH requirement for publications to be made available in PubMedCentral within twelve months, there has been strong growth in the number of bioscience and
- ↑ Cm8329, http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategyfor-growth.pdf
- ↑ Houghton et al Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: exploring the costs and benefits, JISC, 2009; and Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, RLUK, JISC, Wellcome Trust and PRC, 2011. Houghton suggests that a system of ‘overlay journals’, which would operate a peer review system, could be implemented to direct readers to the contents of repositories. But it is not clear on what basis such journals could operate, nor how they themselves could be made sustainable.
