{"id":463,"date":"2012-07-25T15:43:36","date_gmt":"2012-07-25T14:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/?p=463"},"modified":"2012-10-19T16:39:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T15:39:18","slug":"open-access-to-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/2012\/07\/25\/open-access-to-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access to research"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘what we propose implies cultural change: a fundamental shift in how research is published and disseminated’ –\u00a0Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The UK Government has accepted the recommendation of the Working Group,\u00a0chaired by Dame Janet Finch, that by 2014\u00a0publicly funded scientific research be freely available to all on publication, a move described by the Guardian as \u00a0‘the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

Currently academic publishers recoup their costs by charging subscription fees, borne mostly by academic libraries. Finch proposes that cost of publication be borne instead by the producers of research. \u00a0Under this scheme (referred to as the \u2018Gold\u2019 option), authors would pay article processing charges (APCs – expected to be around \u00a32,000 per article) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online.<\/p>\n

An alternative favoured by some academics – the so-called ‘green’ option – would allow researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals. Of course this is likely to seriously, or fatally, damage the revenues of publishers, including Britain’s learned societies, who survive on journal subscriptions.<\/p>\n

Which begs the question – should publishers and learned societies realistically expect to continue as before, with revenues simply transferring from subscriptions to APCs? \u00a0Such a simple transfer seems unlikely as the whole ecology of scholarly publishing and the dissemination of research is already changing. Before the internet, the costs of peer review and disseminating paper-based research publications were costly and complex, involving proofing, typesetting, printing, publishing and distribution. Sensibly this was outsourced to professional publishers (for more on this see Ross Mounce\u2019s guest post on UK Web Focus: Open Access to Science for Everyone<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But the Web is a disruptive force which has undermined many established business models, including newspaper publishing, bookselling, banking and education. So far, the academic publishing business model has resisted change, the printed-based subscription model having been applied virtually unchanged to digital publishing. This looks unsustainable in a world where the social web offers so much variety in the way we find, use, share and rate information of all kinds. Indeed, when Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research (Why hasn\u2019t scientific publishing been disrupted already?)<\/a><\/p>\n

The transition will not be without pain and Finch recognises the tensions between the interests of key stakeholders:<\/p>\n