The UK House of Commons report endorses open accessAfter conducting a thorough inquiry for half a year, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee finally released its report, _Scientific Publications: Free for All?_ . The committee conducted four sessions of oral testimony, hearing from 23 witnesses, and received 143 written submissions. It heard from leaders in research, libraries, universities, publishing, and government who put forward the best arguments for and against open access.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #76
August 2, 2004
by Peter Suber
The report strongly endorses OA archiving and tentatively endorses the upfront funding model for OA journals. Here's my take on the eight most important of the 82 specific conclusions and recommendations:
- The government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open-access institutional repositories.
- Government funding agencies should require faculty receiving research grants to deposit copies of their articles in their institutional repositories.
- The government should create a fund to help authors pay the processing fees charged by open-access journals. The committee is not yet ready to endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals (which it unfortunately calls the "author-pays" model), but wants to create such a fund in order to promote further experimentation with the model.
- The government should develop a wider, long-term strategy that includes open-access journals "as a matter of urgency".
- Journal prices are unacceptably high and publisher justifications for them are not credible. The Office of Fair Trading (the UK office investigating monopolistic business practices) should monitor the journal publishing industry and issue biennial public reports on the "state of the market".
- The government should investigate whether leaving copyright in the hands of authors would have a "disproportionately negative impact" on authors or research. If it would not, then government funding agencies should require their grantees to retain copyright in articles based on funded research.
- All these steps can and should be undertaken without jeopardizing "rigorous and independent peer review".
- The government should fund the British Library to take on the long-term preservation of digital scholarship.
The committee doesn't merely endorse OA, but calls for a national commitment to open access encompassing all UK higher education institutions, the British Library, the Research Councils, the government funding agencies, and government policy-makers. The report recommends many steps, but puts the most weight on the one step that will do the most good: asking government funding agencies to put an OA condition on research grants requiring grantees to deposit the full-text articles based on funded research in OA repositories. Of all the steps that governments can take, this one will deliver OA at the lowest cost and the least disruption to publishers. It is compatible with the survival of conventional journals, the rigor and integrity of peer review, and the freedom of authors to publish where they see fit (in any OA journal or nearly any non-OA journal). It acknowledges that scientific research --especially when funded by taxpayers-- is not an ordinary commodity for ordinary market exploitation.
The report is not a legislative proposal. However, the government is obliged to respond and any of the report's recommendations could be taken up by the House of Commons and proposed as legislation. For now it has a two-fold importance: first as the lengthy, detailed report of a comprehensive inquiry and second, as the first step toward OA legislation if there will be OA legislation in the UK.
* Comparing the US and the UK developments
- The US plan is a legislative proposal. The UK plan is not, at least not yet.
- The US plan applies only to the research in one field funded by one agency. The UK plan is much more comprehensive, applying to all government-funded research, to copyright, to journal prices, and to digital preservation.
- Both plans recognize that taxpayers deserve open access to taxpayer-funded research, both provide it through OA archives rather than OA journals, and both steer this research into OA archives by putting an OA condition on taxpayer-funded research grants.
- The US plan makes use of one government-maintained archive or repository (PubMed Central), while the UK plan makes use of the distributed institutional repositories at UK universities.
- Both plans recognize an access crisis created by the high prices of journals and the increasingly insufficient budgets of libraries. Both recognize that the access crisis harms taxpayers, impedes science, and undermines the government investment in research.
- Both plans harness journal-based peer review as a quality control on taxpayer-funded research, and both recognize that peer review is not threatened by OA.
- The US plan says nothing about OA journals or their business models. The UK plan doesn't endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals but finds it promising enough to deserve further experimentation and even a government fund to help authors cover their fees.
- The UK plan is based on prior hearings that collected oral and written testimony. The US plan is based on long internal deliberations at the NIH informed by external consultations. (The NIH has been thinking about OA roughly since Harold Varmus became its director in 1993; current NIH officials attended the April 2003 meeting that produced the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.)
- Both plans are momentous advances for OA. If adopted as law, they will do more to advance the cause of OA than any previous steps in our history. They will greatly accelerate scientific research by sharing hard-won knowledge with the researchers who can build on it and the taxpayers who paid for it. There is no doubt that they will inspire citizens in other countries to call upon their governments to adopt similar policies.
Scientific Publications: Free for All? (July 20, 2004)
HTML http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm
PDF http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf
Oral and written evidence from the inquiry (PDF only)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399ii.pdf
HTML version of the written evidence from the inquiry
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we01.htm
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technology_committee.cfm
I list some news stories about the committee report below in the section on major news stories.
* Postscript. The day after the UK report was released, Elsevier announced price increases three times higher than the rate of inflation. At the same time the price of Elsevier stock rose more than 10 points because the report did not directly endorse OA journals.
On the price increases, see Richard Wray in the July 21 Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1265546,00.html
On the stock price, see Agence France Presse in the July 21 ChannelNewsAsia
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/96698/1/.html
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