UK White Paper commits the Government to require OA to all outputs from publicly funded research

Abstract

In their recently published “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth”, the UK Government describes how they will support R&D through the UK Higher Education Institutions.

Our readers will probably be most interested in the following sections:

• Section 6.6: “The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.”

• Section 6.7: “There are many successful international examples of open access research. At Harvard, academics often grant the university a non-exclusive irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly output for non-commercial use. Their articles are then stored, preserved and made freely available through the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.”

• Section 6.8: “The Government will work with partners, including the publishing industry; to achieve free access to publicly-funded research as soon as possible and will set an example itself.”and, finally,  this important section regarding the results of UK research funder mandates:

• Section 6.9: “The Research Councils expect the researchers they fund to deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication. But this practice is unevenly enforced. Therefore, as an immediate step, we have asked the Research Councils to ensure the researchers they fund fulfil the current requirements. Additionally, the Research Councils have now agreed to invest £2 million in the development, by 2013, of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’.”

David Willetts, the UK's Science Minister said at a briefing to launch the government strategy:”"We set out very clearly in the document today our commitment to open access. We want to move to open access, but in a way that ensures that peer review and publishing continues as a function. It needs to be paid for somehow. One of the clear options is to shift to a system from which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish. But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish." (The Guardian)