UK Report Calls for Publicly Available STM Research

In a remarkable conclusion to the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee's inquiry into STM publishing (see News, LJ 5/1/04, p. 18), the committee July 20 issued its final report, which recommends that all publicly funded research in the UK be made publicly available and that government take a leading role in that mission.

"A government strategy is urgently needed," according to the report, Scientific Publications, Free for All? Citing the struggles of academic libraries in the opening line of its summary, the report recommends that UK institutions "establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be read free-of-charge online" and that the government appoint "a central body" to oversee implementation.

The report also calls for government action to address digital preservation issues and to eliminate VAT charges on e-journals. While supportive of open access (OA) publishing, the report doesn't endorse an immediate shift to the OA model, expressing concerns over the potential effect on scientific societies and recommending "further experimentation."

"The market for scientific publications is international. The UK cannot act alone," the report notes. "For this reason we recommended that the UK Government act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example."

Open access supporters cheered. Jan Velterop, CEO of open access publisher BioMed Central, called the report the "clearest political signal yet that open access to the research literature is to be regarded of great benefit to science and society."

For commercial publishers, there was less good news. The report criticized practices such as bundling and is unimpressed by the wave of statistics the industry has used to justify massive price increases. Arie Jongejan, chief executive of science and technology publishing at Elsevier, struggled to find a silver lining. Jongejan told London's Guardian that the company considers "some of the concerns expressed in the report about government policy on scientific publishing to be overstated."

Before the UK report was issued, Springer, the second largest commercial STM publisher, announced the launch of Open Choice, an OA variation. For a $3000 fee, Springer authors can now opt to make their research freely available in any of the company's journals via SpringerLink, the publisher's online platform.

True open access, Velterop commented, implies by definition "that all use is fair use as long as the author and article are properly cited." While Springer Open Choice articles will be made freely available via SpringerLink, Velterop noted that Springer's program employs a strict copyright policy.

Velterop also contended, "What [authors] have to gain is not in any way in proportion to the cost of $3000." Sabine Schaub, Springer's executive VP for corporate communication, however, told LJthat the $3000 fee was chosen after "a careful analysis of all the costs involved in publishing a single article in a Springer journal."

Also, Oxford University Press announced that its Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) will become a fully OA journal in January 2005. The OUP model relies on a mix of author charges, institutional memberships, and print subscriptions. Richard Gedye, sales director, cited talks with academic librarians as helping develop "a model where buying institutional memberships would keep the cost of author charges low enough to maximize the chances of NAR's long-term success as an open access journal."

Authors from member institutions will pay $500 per article; those from nonmember institutions will pay $1500 per article. (Authors from poorer nations will pay no fee.) Membership for 2005 is $2,459, the same price as an online subscription to NAR in 2004, so Oxford expects libraries to be the significant source of those funds.

In the United States, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee in July approved a provision recommending that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The committee called on NIH to offer access to authors' final manuscripts and supplemental materials via PubMed Central six months after publication. The grantee used NIH funds to pay any publication charges, such as digital distribution fees. PMC access would be immediate.

Publishers said the provision amounted to a "market intervention." Rick Johnson, executive director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), however, called the proposal "a reasoned, incremental step." NIH must inform the committee by December 1 how it intends to implement the process.