Public access to publicly-funded research

The question of whether the public should be allowed to freely access publicly-funded research has been raging for years now, culminating recently in an all-out assault on the restrictions of traditional publishing models dubbed the Academic Spring. Read on for some history and what the UK is doing about it.

The “traditional” model of research and publishing in the public sector goes something like this:

1. A public body (such as a research council) is assigned public money (tax revenues) to fund research.
2. A researcher applies to the public body for a project grant.
3. The researcher is successful, and goes off to do a research project.
4. The research turns up some results that are of interest to the scientific community.
5. The researchers writes up the results in a paper and submits it to a journal.
6. The journal sends the paper out for peer review, a process whereby scientists volunteer to check papers to see if they’re any good.
7. The paper is accepted for publication, and appears in an upcoming edition of the journal.
8. The journal publishers sell the journal to readers (scientists, universities, libraries etc.).
9. The publication increases the researcher’s credibility, and hence ability to attract further funding.

A summary of objections to this model is:

• Journals exercise complete control over who can and can’t read their articles. If you don’t buy the journal, you can’t read the paper.
• Journals are effectively making profits from something they are getting for nothing – the research is funded by the public, papers are written by researchers and peer review is done for free.
• The public pays for research through their taxes, but does not get to see the results without paying again to subscribe to a journal.
• In the current research system, it’s “publish or perish” – it is extremely difficult to advance a scientific career without publishing in major journals and perpetuating this model.

In January 2012, British mathematician Timothy Gowers wrote a post on his blog explaining why he was boycotting Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. He reasoned that if enough academics refused to publish in Elsevier journals and enough libraries refused to buy them then the restrictive publishing model could be turned on its head and used to disseminate findings as far as possible rather than enrich a publisher. This is broadly accepted to be the start of the Academic Spring, though the government had commissioned a report into open access publishing around six months earlier.

Many debates and much media coverage later, the Finch Report recommended that all publicly-funded research be published in open-access or hybrid journals. The government accepted the recommendations a few weeks later, and Research Councils UK set out rules stating that all £3 B of RCUK-funded research had to be made freely available (something that the Wellcome Trust had done the previous month). The European Commission swiftly followed suit, committing one of the world’s largest research budgets to open access.

With the global scientific establishment taking note of this unprecedented development, we here at SIN Canada look forward to reporting on new innovations and collaborations stimulated by this commitment to open access for some of the world’s finest research.

Update 24 July 2012: SIN colleagues have pointed out that I should also link to the UK’s Open Data Institute and the Royal Society’s report Science as a Public Enterprise.