Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
UK to make all public funded academic research publications Open Access
Open, free access to academic research? This will be a seismic shift
Opening up access to academic research will put more data and power in the hands of the people who pay for it
David Willetts
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 16.00 EDT
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales will be helping ensure that the publicly funded portal promotes collaboration and engagement. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
My department spends about £5bn each year funding academic research – and it is because we believe in the fundamental importance of this research that we have protected the science budget for the whole of this parliament.
We fund this research because it furthers human knowledge and drives intellectual, social and economic progress. In line with our commitment to open information, tomorrow I will be announcing at the Publishers Association annual meeting that we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers. Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research.
The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers. The controversy about the status and reliability of reviews on TripAdvisor is a reminder of how precious genuine, objective peer review is. We still need to pay for such functions, which is why one attractive model – known as gold – has the funders of research covering the costs. Another approach, known as green, includes a closed period before wider release during which journals can earn revenues.
While opening up the fruits of research is a seismic shift for academic publishing, it is not a leap into the unknown. There are many good examples in medicine. For instance, the Wellcome Trust requires all the research it funds to be made freely available online. A report this year from the U.S. Committee for Economic Development has concluded that the US National Institute of Health's policy of open access has accelerated the transition from basic research to commercialisation, generated more follow-on research and reduced duplicate or dead-end lines of inquiry – so increasing the US government's return on its investment in research. And the researcher Philip Davis has found that, when publishers randomly make articles open access on journal websites, readership increases by up to 250%.
Moving from an era ...
Opening up access to academic research will put more data and power in the hands of the people who pay for it
David Willetts
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 16.00 EDT
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales will be helping ensure that the publicly funded portal promotes collaboration and engagement. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
My department spends about £5bn each year funding academic research – and it is because we believe in the fundamental importance of this research that we have protected the science budget for the whole of this parliament.
We fund this research because it furthers human knowledge and drives intellectual, social and economic progress. In line with our commitment to open information, tomorrow I will be announcing at the Publishers Association annual meeting that we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers. Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research.
The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers. The controversy about the status and reliability of reviews on TripAdvisor is a reminder of how precious genuine, objective peer review is. We still need to pay for such functions, which is why one attractive model – known as gold – has the funders of research covering the costs. Another approach, known as green, includes a closed period before wider release during which journals can earn revenues.
While opening up the fruits of research is a seismic shift for academic publishing, it is not a leap into the unknown. There are many good examples in medicine. For instance, the Wellcome Trust requires all the research it funds to be made freely available online. A report this year from the U.S. Committee for Economic Development has concluded that the US National Institute of Health's policy of open access has accelerated the transition from basic research to commercialisation, generated more follow-on research and reduced duplicate or dead-end lines of inquiry – so increasing the US government's return on its investment in research. And the researcher Philip Davis has found that, when publishers randomly make articles open access on journal websites, readership increases by up to 250%.
Moving from an era ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/01/open-free-access-academic-research
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
