All scientific research funded by British taxpayers will be made available online free of charge, according to a government report published earlier this week. And it doesn鈥檛 stop there 鈥� the government intends the website, to be named , to eventually incorporate research funded by other bodies.
Much of the high-energy physics research community currently uses a system of open-access online publishing, and Janet Finch, former vice-chair of Keele University, UK, has been charged with investigating how the UK might set up something similar for all its taxpayer-funded science. The website, an online repository set up in 1991, offers almost all high-energy physics research for free. Despite this, established physics journals .
The announcement is part of a growing trend towards open access, following the success of the free journals and, more recently, .
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No way to get a job
Critics of the government鈥檚 announcement have argued that these prominent open-access journals already allow researchers to publish their research online for free, and yet some still choose not to. of the , Germany, a prominent advocate of open access to research, says this criticism is unfair: 鈥淥ne of the major obstacles to open-access publishing is that the highest-ranking journals have chosen not to go open-access. We may in principle be free to publish wherever we want already, but not if we want to get a job.鈥�
British science minister David Willetts suggests that peer-reviewed journals could become open-access by charging their contributors, rather than their readers. 鈥淥ne of the clear options is to shift from a system in which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish.鈥�
However, Brembs argues that paying to publish won鈥檛 tackle one of the major issues that sparked the open-access movement 鈥� the high price of journals. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the spiralling charges by the publishers which really need be brought under control.鈥�
