Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/Conclusions and Recommendations

8. Conclusions and Recommendations

8.1. The research communications system is in a period of transition towards open access. We believe that, at its simplest, this is a shift from a reader-pays to an author-pays system, which in turn requires a shift in publications processes and business models. The aim of our recommendations is to accelerate that process, but in an ordered way; and to sustain while it takes place what is most valuable in the complex ecology we have described. It is critically important also to sustain an environment which promotes innovation from both established players and new entrants, especially in key areas we have identified, including linkages between publications and underlying data, the publication of monographs, and experimentation in the mechanisms of peer review. Achieving those goals depends on concerted action from universities, funders and publishers, as well as researchers themselves. The process will be complex, since when we set the available mechanisms against the criteria for success we presented in Section 6, it became clear that no single one of them can provide a satisfactory means of achieving all of our objectives, at least for the foreseeable future. We reach that conclusion for a number of reasons.

8.2. First, research and its publication are international activities: as we have noted at several points in this report, researchers in the UK collaborate with colleagues overseas, but they are responsible for only about 6% of the nearly two million articles published across the globe each year. It is entirely appropriate in the public interest that the UK should, as one of the leading research nations in the world, take a lead in adopting policies that maximise access to research undertaken in the UK, particularly when that research is publicly-funded. Such policies in themselves, however, will have little impact in improving access to the great majority of publications produced by researchers in the rest of the world.

8.3. Second, it is of the utmost importance during the transition to sustain the world-leading status and performance of the UK research community. That success is underpinned by the support that researchers receive from learned societies in the UK, and by systems to ensure that they have effective and high-quality channels through which they can publish and disseminate their findings. These are key elements in an ecology of international co-operation and competition that helps researchers to perform to the best standards, not least by subjecting their findings to rigorous peer review. Those key elements must not be put at risk.

8.4. Third, periods of transition almost invariably bring with them additional costs. It is unlikely that significant increases in access—in the amount of quality-assured content that is available free at the point of use, and in the numbers of people and organisations to whom it is available—can over the next few years be achieved cost-free. During the transition, it is essential to sustain the key and valuable features of the research communications system; and the key players in that system require revenues to support their core activities. But the costs must be sustainable for funders too. That poses a particular challenge when there are severe constraints on public expenditure.

8.5. We are also conscious that the interests of different groups of stakeholders and players in the research communications landscape do not necessarily coincide.

i. Researchers are interested in speedy and effective publication and dissemination of research publications. As authors they are interested in securing publication in high-status journals which maximise their chances of securing high impact and credit for the work they have done, and their chances of winning the next research grant. As readers and users they are interested in speedy access, free at the point of use; ease of navigation; and the ability to use, and re-use, content with as few restrictions as possible.

ii. Universities and other research institutions are interested in maximising their research income and performance, while bearing down on expenditure. The larger research-intensive universities already enjoy (and pay for) access to the majority of the journals relevant to their work; but they could face additional costs as a result of a shift to author-side payments. Less research-intensive universities could see reductions in costs as a result of such a shift.

iii. Research funders are interested in securing the maximum impact from high-quality research, and thus in ensuring that publications arising from work that they fund are widely accessible—across the global research community as well as all other communities that may have an interest in the results—with as few restrictions as possible. Like universities, they are also interested in bearing down on costs.

iv. Libraries—in the HE sector in particular—are interested in maximising the number of journals and other research publications they can provide for their readers, at the lowest possible cost. Librarians have been in the vanguard in seeking to limit increases in the costs of journals, and in promoting the development of repositories. They are also developing their roles in providing new services to researchers in an information environment that has changed fundamentally in the last decade.

v. Publishers come in many different guises: those that publish thousands of titles and those that publish one; the commercial and the non-commercial; university presses and learned societies; and open access and subscriptionbased, with many operating both models. All are interested in sustaining and developing services for the effective publication and dissemination of research publications that are underpinned by peer review. Subscription-based and open access publishers operate different business models; but both are interested in securing the revenues that enable them to offer high-quality services to authors and to readers/users. For subscription-based publishers, developments such as repositories—particularly if embargo periods and other restrictions on use and re-use rights are reduced—pose risks that cause them great concern, because this can undermine business models by preventing them recouping their costs. For open access publishers, such developments are essentially immaterial because they recoup their costs upfront through APCs; repositories simply provide an additional channel for the dissemination of the articles they publish.

vi. Learned societies are interested in sustaining their support for the publication and dissemination of high-quality research, but also their work for public benefit in promoting and supporting scholarship in the disciplines they represent, and in helping to ensure that the UK sustains a strong international presence in those disciplines. Any risks to the surpluses they secure through their publications imperil also the wider activities of the societies in question, which publication surpluses are used to fund.

8.6. There are tensions clearly between the interests of different players; and in the complex ecology we have outlined, it is not surprising that each of the possible mechanisms for achieving our goal of increased access has its own strengths and weaknesses. In the course of our work we developed a grid to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the three mechanisms, and a version of that grid is presented in Annex D. We consider the issues in more extended form in this Section.

8.7. It is important also to stress that the mechanisms are not mutually exclusive: as we have noted, journals can work effectively with repositories, particularly the subject-based ones. Indeed, some key policy issues revolve around the relationships between repositories and subscription-based journals on the one hand, and open access journals on the other.

8.8. It is clear to us that in moving towards the goal of increased access combined with sustainability and research excellence, our analysis points to the need for a shift in policy and funding arrangements. We are already seeing a shift from articles and journals supported by funds provided on behalf of readers to those where funds are provided on behalf of authors. Publications supported by author-side payments remove most of the barriers to access, as well as the restrictions on rights of use and re-use that are inherent in the subscription-based business model.

8.9. Both subscription-based publications and the versions that are accessible via repositories are subject to copyright and other restrictions which mean that they are available for access, printing and download for non-commercial research and private study only. Readers may not automatically search, scrape, extract, deep link or index the articles; and they usually have to apply specially for permission for text and data mining. As ‘semantic publishing’ and the tools and services that enable researchers and others automatically to organise and manipulate content develop further and become more widely available, it will become more important to ensure that users have the rights to exploit these new technologies and services.

8.10. Our key conclusion, therefore, is that a clear policy direction should be set to support the publication of research results in open access or hybrid journals funded by APCs. A clear policy direction of that kind from Government, the Funding Councils and the Research Councils would have a major effect in stimulating, guiding and accelerating the shift to open access. Nevertheless, the transition across the world is likely to take a number of years. During that period, all three of our mechanisms—licensing and repositories as well as open access and hybrid journals—will remain in play. Measures to increase access will therefore have to include the more effective use of all three; and it is important that progress on all fronts should be carefully monitored.

Open access journals

8.11. Open access and hybrid journals are already a significant part of the research publishing landscape (though the same is not yet true for monographs). Open access journals overall are growing, albeit from a small base, at a faster rate than traditional subscription-based journals. Measures to facilitate and stimulate take-up of the option to publish in such journals would bring significant improvements in access to publications arising from UK research; and that would bring benefits to people and organisations both in the UK and the rest of the world. A particular advantage of open access journals is that publishers can afford to be more relaxed about rights of use and re-use

8.12. The draft policy proposals now emanating from the Research Councils clearly have those goals in mind. They would require that publications resulting from the research they support should be made accessible as soon as possible, free of charge, to anyone who wishes to read them; that such access should be to the version of record, as provided on the publisher’s platform; and that access should come with as few restrictions as possible on rights of use and re-use. If they are accompanied by arrangements for more flexible use of research funds to pay for publication, these proposals would remove a major barrier to publication in open access or hybrid journals.

8.13. The Funding Councils are also developing proposals under which they would require that in any REF or similar exercise after 2014, the publications submitted for assessment should be freely accessible so far as possible. Taken together, these new policies will, so long as funding is provided to meet APCs, stimulate a significant shift towards publication of research in open access or hybrid journals in the next few years.

8.14. Publishers who respond to these policy developments by moving successfully to the open access or hybrid model will be able to give immediate access to the version of record, with full functionality and rights of use; and to sustain their investment in high-quality peer review, marketing, discovery and navigation, preservation and other services that meet the needs of both authors and readers. A move to open access publishing will of course involve significant costs and risks, as well as operational and policy challenges that will need careful handling. The risks and challenges will be acute for leading journals with high rejection rates, where the level of APCs is likely also to be high.

8.15. The challenges will also be acute for many learned societies which rely on surpluses from high-status journals to fund their scholarly and related activities. The surpluses that societies earn from the publication and distribution of successful journals across the world play a vital role in supporting their activities in the UK. Many societies rely on such surpluses for half or more of their income. Recent studies indicate that 90% of some societies’ journal subscription and licence income comes from overseas; and that the great majority of the benefit that societies provide through their non-publishing activities accrues to the UK.^[1] If they can make the shift to open access journals on a sustainable basis, learned societies should also be able to maintain many of the services they provide to the research community. We consider these issues further in the following section.

8.16. The challenges do not rest wholly, however, with publishers and learned societies. All parties—funders, universities, and researchers as well as publishers and learned societies—will have to work together to address key issues relating to collaborative research and publication, arrangements to constrain transaction costs, and arrangements for the support of unaffiliated authors. Overall, however, we believe that open access publishing can offer a sustainable mechanism for increasing access, while sustaining high quality research and high-quality services to readers. In seeking to maximise access to the UK’s research publications free at the point of use for the benefit of the greatest number of potential users, we are clear that a policy direction set towards promoting the publication of research articles in open access or hybrid journals is the right course to take.

Licensing extensions

8.17. Since it is clear that licensing will continue to play an important part in the research communications system worldwide for some time to come, effective measures to increase access must include, at least for the short to medium term, extensions to current licensing arrangements. In the short term, indeed, such extensions are the only way to increase access free at the point of use to publications by authors from overseas. Such extensions should aim to increase both the numbers of people and organisations who have licensed access to research publications in the UK, and the numbers of publications accessible to them.

8.18. As we noted in Section 7, although the idea of national licences for the whole UK population has some attractions, we do not believe that it is either practicable or affordable in current circumstances. But there is scope for rationalising and extending licensed access in ways which would bring significant benefits to people and organisations in a range of sectors.

8.19. In the higher education sector, there is growing interest in developing a licence regime which would provide access to a large core of journals for all universities. Such a move would bring real benefits for staff and students in many institutions. The costs would be relatively modest, although since the largest and most research-intensive institutions enjoy access to the great majority of journals already, the benefit-cost ratio would be relatively modest too.

8.20. In the health sector, there is scope for increasing and rationalising arrangements for licensed access across the NHS, and greater co-ordination with the HE sector. Again, providing access to all relevant journals for all those who work in the NHS would cost relatively little on top of what is already spent on licences.

8.21. Extending current licensing arrangements in sectors beyond higher education and the NHS would bring undoubted benefits too. Extensions to cover the various organisations in large sectors of society and the economy such as central and local Government, business (especially SMEs) and the voluntary sector would raise some difficult practical issues, and the costs could be relatively high. Nevertheless, we believe that publishers, representative bodies for key sectors, libraries and other organisations with relevant expertise should work together to consider the terms and costs of broader licence agreements; and possible sources of funding. It will be important in such discussions to ensure that extended access is not restricted to the titles of the large publishers, but includes also the many journals—many of them highly valuable in their fields—published by smaller publishers including learned societies.

8.22. In the meantime, we strongly recommend that the two proposals that have emerged during the course of our discussions should be taken forward. First, JISC Collections should explore with publishers and universities the scope for introducing licences which would allow members of R&D-intensive SMEs to gain online access to journals which are currently accessible only to members of a university. That would make a real difference to researchers and others in micro-enterprises that cannot afford large licence packages themselves.

8.23. Second, we warmly welcome the proposal to provide walk-in access to journals in public libraries, and perhaps also some learned society libraries too. Much of the detail is still to be worked out. But so long as the initiative is accompanied by effective marketing, and by guidance for both librarians and users on the nature of journals and their contents, and on how best to navigate to relevant material, it will have an immediate effect in extending access for the benefit of everyone in the country. It will also help to strengthen the usage and value of public libraries in the communities they serve.

Repositories

8.24. The evidence suggests that—beyond the relatively narrow range of subjects and disciplines that support large-scale repositories—the impact of repositories on researcher behaviour has so far been limited. Moreover, the UK on its own can do little to increase access via repositories to the great majority of global publications that are produced by researchers in other countries. Unless there are significant moves overseas, much of the research published by researchers from China, North American and other major research nations may remain accessible only on payment of a subscription or PPV charge.

8.25. Nevertheless, measures in the UK to encourage the further development and use of repositories could lead to significant improvements in access to publications and reports arising from UK research. The benefits would be perceived within universities in facilitating research management, in providing a showcase for research outputs and expertise, and in providing a mechanism for the management of research data. Perhaps more important for our purposes would be the benefits arising from access to research results for those, outside higher education and the large R&D-intensive companies, who cannot afford large subscription packages One of the keys to achieving such benefits is effective co-operation between repositories and publishers, such as is already evident, for example, in the case of UKPMC.

8.26. We recognise, however, that there are tensions between the interests of subscription-based publishers and those promoting the use of repositories. The terms of the relationships between repositories and publishers are thus particularly important because—for all the reasons outlined in the previous section and elsewhere in this report—it is unlikely that either institutional or subject-based repositories could by themselves provide a satisfactory model for a research communications system that involves the effective publication and dissemination of quality-assured research findings. In a digital world where ‘everything is miscellaneous’^[2] users need an array of services to provide effective signals to help them navigate to the publications that are most relevant and important for their purposes, and of the highest quality. Quality assurance through peer review, coupled with the wide range of discovery, navigation, linking and related services provided by publishers and other intermediaries are thus of critical importance to both authors and users of research publications.

8.27. As we have noted earlier, open access journals secure their revenues to support such services at the point of publication, through their APCs. Hence it is relatively straightforward for them to co-operate with repositories which simply provide an additional channel—alongside their own publisher platform—for access to the articles they publish.

8.28. Subscription-based publishers, on the other hand, recoup most of the costs of such services through the fees they charge for licences to gain access to journals and articles precisely on their own platforms. Other channels for access are rivals, not complements to those platforms. Hence they impose restrictions on access via repositories—embargo periods, restrictions on the version of the article that can be deposited and its functionality, and restrictions on rights of use and re-use—in order to preserve their licence revenues and the viability of their journals. As we noted earlier in this report, such restrictions seem to have been effective in limiting the usefulness of repositories, and hence any potential adverse impact on journals in the form of subscription cancellations. But publishers have strong concerns about the possibility that funders might introduce further limits on the restrictions on access that they allow in their terms and conditions of grant. They believe that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to six months, especially if it were to be combined with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence that would allow commercial as well as non-commercial re-use, would represent a fundamental threat to the viability of their subscription-based journals.

8.29. We cannot resolve all these tensions. But we endorse the conclusion of the Open Road report^[3] that policy-makers should be cautious about pushing for reductions in embargo periods and in other restrictions on access to the point where the sustainability of the underlying publishing model is put at risk. If dedicated funding is not provided to meet the costs of APCs, and researchers cannot therefore publish in open access or hybrid journals, we believe that it would be unreasonable to require embargo periods shorter than twelve months. On the other hand, where successful accommodations can be reached, as in the relationships between publishers and large subject-based repositories such as PubMedCentral and ArXiv, each can work alongside each other in an environment where they each have distinctive roles; and the repositories can become an important feature in the daily workflows of researchers and others interested in research results.

8.30. For universities, it would make sense to exploit the institutional repositories they have established to best effect. Further investment is required to develop an infrastructure which supports easy discovery and navigation across repositories and their contents. In order to address these problems, we recommend that further steps should be taken to develop

i. more effective interoperability, metadata standards, and search and navigation facilities;

ii. interaction between funders, publishers, universities and research institutions in facilitating deposit of publications;

iii. linkages between repositories and research information management systems; and

iv. awareness and use of repositories and their contents by people and organisations beyond the research and HE communities, especially those with poor levels of access at present.

8.31. With the benefit of further investment to develop the infrastructure in this way, and better co-ordination between funders, universities and publishers, repositories could have a valuable role to play not just within universities, but also in a number of areas of the broader research communications landscape. These include

i. Preserving and providing access to research data, and working with publishers to ensure that there are effective links between publications and underlying or related data

ii. Providing a mechanism not just for access but for the long-term preservation of many different kinds of digital content, including research publications in those cases where—as is sometimes the case with smaller publishers—publishers’ own arrangements for preservation are at present unsatisfactory. It is important, however, that the implications of such a role should be considered carefully, and that repositories should ensure that they develop and implement robust preservation arrangements

iii. Providing access to grey literature (see Section 2) in the form of reports, working papers, technical specifications and other material that is often not readily-available from other sources. Repositories also provide a valuable mechanism for providing access to theses and dissertations. The role of repositories in disseminating such material beyond the academic world could be particularly useful, and steps should be taken to promote the use of repositories across constituencies where awareness of their existence is currently very low.

8.32. In all these ways, we believe that repositories could and should perform an important part of the landscape of research communications, complementary to that of publishers and their publications. But achieving that complementarity will require careful attention to all the matters outlined above. Policies relating to embargos and other restrictions on access to published material will require especial care; otherwise, the underlying publishing model will be put further at risk.

A mixed model

8.33. In sum, our conclusion is that, in order to maximise access for the greatest number of people to the greatest number of research publications, while sustaining high standards of usability, and the quality of the services provided to the UK research community, a number of measures are needed:

i. a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded;

ii. the Research Councils and other public sector bodies funding research in the UK should establish more effective and flexible arrangements to meet the costs of publishing in open access and hybrid journals;

iii. support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes, and on the ability to use the latest tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content;

iv. during the period of transition to open access publishing worldwide, in order to maximise access in the HE and health sectors to journals and articles produced by authors in the UK and from across the world that are not accessible on open access terms, funds should be found to extend and rationalise current licences to cover all the institutions in those sectors;

v. the current discussions on how to implement the proposal for walk-in access to the majority of journals to be provided in public libraries across the UK should be pursued with vigour, along with an effective publicity and marketing campaign;

vi. representative bodies for key sectors including central and local Government, voluntary organisations, and business should work together with publishers, learned societies, libraries and others with relevant expertise to consider the terms and costs of licences to provide access to a broad range of relevant content for the benefit of consortia of organisations within their sectors; and how such licences might be funded;

vii. future discussions and negotiations between universities and publishers (including learned societies) on the pricing of big deals and other subscriptions should take into account the financial implications of the shift to publication in open access and hybrid journals, of extensions to licensing, and the resultant changes in revenues provided to publishers;

viii. universities, funders, publishers, and learned societies should continue to work together to promote further experimentation in open access publishing for scholarly monographs;

ix. the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should be developed so that they play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation;.

x. funders’ limitations on the length of embargo periods, and on any other restrictions on access to content not published on open access terms, should be considered carefully, to avoid undue risk to valuable journals that are not funded in the main by APCs. Rules should be kept under review in the light of the available evidence as to their likely impact on such journals.

8.34. In pursuing these recommendations, we believe that all the key stakeholders in the UK can work together to develop an agreed approach; and that collectively they can take a lead internationally, and help to shape the debate and the direction of policy. Indeed, this will be essential if the UK is to maximise the likelihood that other countries with significant levels of research publications put similar policies and systems in place. It will also be essential to sustain close dialogue and monitoring of progress both in the UK and overseas, so that key issues and any unintended consequences during the transition years are identified early, and that remedial action can be taken where necessary.

Costs

8.35. We noted earlier that it is unlikely that increases in access can be achieved without cost, although they will be modest in comparison with the amounts spent on other aspects of the research process. Some of the costs will be one-off, in setting up new policies, systems and services, others will continue for the medium term. The study for the Open Road report^[4] estimated that the transition costs to universities and other research institutions in the UK, as well as to publishers, of a significant shift towards greater access using any one of the three mechanisms we have considered^[5] would amount to between £2.5m and £7.0m in one-off costs (the highest for open access journals, the lowest for repositories); and between £0.2m and £4.0m a year (the highest for repositories, the lowest for licence extensions)in continuing costs. Much of those costs related to the time to be spent in negotiation, consultation, advocacy and monitoring.

8.36. Using all three mechanisms to increase access during the transition period as we recommend will give rise to transition and development costs, as well as continuing system costs, for each mechanisms. We consider each of them below.

Open access journals

8.37. We noted in Section 7 that the cash costs to the Research Councils and the HE sector—and to the UK as a whole—of a shift to publishing research articles in open access journals depend on four key factors:

i. the average level of APCs;

ii. the extent to which adoption in the UK is on average ahead of the rest of the world;

iii. the proportion that is met from UK sources of the costs of APCs for articles with overseas as well as UK authors; and

iv. the extent to which universities and other organisations can reduce their expenditure on subscriptions even as their expenditure on APCs rises, and the speed of that shift.

8.38. It is impossible to reach firm conclusions on any of these points. And on the level of APCs in particular, it would be wrong for us to make any recommendation as to what an appropriate level should be: a market has already been established by the existing open access journals, and competition in that market is likely to intensify as a result of the measures we recommend, as the move towards open access gathers pace, and as more leading journals offer the hybrid open access option. But some high-status journals, with correspondingly high rejection rates and other cost drivers, are likely to charge APCs much higher than the average currently being paid. Nevertheless, it is clear that under almost any plausible scenario, there would be significant cost savings to a wide range of organisations and individuals outside the HE sector. For the HE sector itself, the picture is more complex.

8.39. Under optimistic assumptions about levels of take-up, with adoption of open access publishing at the same levels in the UK as in the rest of the world, and with other countries meeting a reasonable share of the costs of APCs for articles resulting from international collaboration, the costs to the HE sector would be minimal. There could even be cash savings, so long as the average level of APCs is £1450 or lower. As we noted in Section 7, however, under more pessimistic assumptions about levels of take-up, where the UK is significantly ahead of the rest of the world in adopting publication in open access or hybrid journals, and with APCs on average at a higher rate, the additional cost to the HE sector could be over £70m a year.

8.40. A mid-range set of assumptions is based around APCs on average at c£1,750, adoption in the UK at twice the level in the rest of the world, and the UK meeting half the costs of APCs where there is at least one overseas author. In that case, if half of all articles produced by UK researchers were to be published in open access or hybrid journals, we estimate that—allowing in addition to the figures presented in Annex E for some ‘stickiness’ as universities have to sustain high levels of expenditure on subscriptions even as their expenditure on APCs rises—the additional costs to the HE sector would be of the order of £38m a year.

8.41. The costs to individual universities will depend on all the factors outlined in paragraph 8.37 above, but in addition on each institution’s size and research-intensity, as well as its subject profile and the proportion of its research activity that is funded from external sources. The latter will be critical in underpinning a university’s ability to meet the costs of APCs out of the research grants and contracts it wins (see Section 7).

Licence extensions

8.42. The costs of extensions to the current range of licences will depend, as we noted in Section 7, on the number of additional people and organisations, and of journal titles, covered by the extensions. Our estimate of the cost of extending and rationalising current licences to cover the whole HE and health sectors is around £10m a year. We have not attempted to estimate the cost of extensions to other sectors, though we believe they could be relatively high, given the relatively low levels of licensed access at present outside HE and health. As we noted in Section 7, the public library initiative implies at present no substantive cost to the public purse.

Repositories

8.43. The costs of establishing institutional repositories in most universities in the UK have largely been met already. But developing the repository infrastructure in the ways we have outlined (with better interoperability, linking and so on), and further development of individual repository platforms, will require significant additional investment, of perhaps £3-5m. Running costs estimated to be between £26k and £210k for each university (depending on the size of the university and its research community) are already being met. But if institutional repositories are to reach the scale and to develop the services that will attract significantly more users, and more broadly if they are to fulfil the kinds of role we have suggested, it is likely that running costs will have to rise beyond current levels.^[6]

Summary

8.44. It will be clear that any estimates of the total costs of increasing access through all three mechanisms as we suggest are subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Our best estimate is that achieving a significant and sustainable increase in access, making best use of all three mechanisms, would require an additional £50-60m a year in expenditure from the HE sector: £38m on publishing in open access journals, £10m on extensions to licences for the HE and health sectors and £3-5m on repositories, plus one-off transition costs of £5m. Those estimates may be set in the context of Government expenditure on research and development (£10.4bn in 2009-10) or of the expenditure on research by the Research Councils and Higher Education Funding Councils (£5.5bn). Indeed, we believe that the costs are modest in order to accelerate the move from a research communications system which is becoming increasingly unsustainable as a result of the economic, technological and social changes which we have highlighted in this report. Moreover, while any estimates of the benefits that will accrue to the UK economy and society are similarly subject to much uncertainty, it is clear that the benefits will be real and substantial. In short, we believe that the investments necessary to improve the current research communications system will yield significant returns in improving the efficiency of research, and in enhancing its impact for the benefit of the UK.

8.45. But we do not believe that it would be reasonable to expect universities and related research institutions to meet all of the additional costs of the fundamental change we recommend without support from the public purse and other sources. Funds to allow for the necessary additional expenditure could be released in a number of ways: through the provision of additional money from the public purse; by moves to reduce the burden on VAT levied on e-journals; by diversion of funds from other features of the research process towards the costs of publication and dissemination; or by bearing down on the costs of publishers and other intermediaries. We believe that there is scope to release funds through all those routes, and we share the Wellcome Trust’s firm contention that publication and dissemination should be regarded as an integral part of the research process itself, and should be funded as such.

8.46. But we also believe that it is important to look at the costs of publication, dissemination and access in the round, taking full account of the costs borne by, and the revenues supplied from and to, all the agents in the system; and that there should be greater transparency on these issues. Thus in the context of the mixed model we recommend for the medium term, universities and funders should expect to be able to use their market power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them of both APCs and subscriptions. One of the key advantages of open access publishing is that it brings greater transparency to the market, with competition on price as well as the status of the journals in which researchers wish to publish. Both are important, and we expect competition to intensify on both fronts. It is equally important, however, that funders and universities should make a firm commitment to ensuring that a high-quality publishing system is sustained and enhanced to underpin—and to maximise the benefits that are derived from—the world-leading performance of the UK research community: cost-effectiveness, not cheapness, should be the aim

Dependencies and risks

8.47. Our recommendations amount to a balanced package of measures to be taken to increase access to research publications and to accelerate the transition to open access publishing. They involve some compromises and trade-offs on the part of each of the key players and stakeholders in the research communications system; and it is important therefore that no single measure should be taken in isolation. For we are clear that effective and sustainable progress depends on continuing co-operation and good will between all the parties.

8.48. It is important also to stress the risks we have noted in the course of this report: risks for universities, funders, libraries, publishers, learned societies, for researchers, and not least for the success and standing of the UK and its research community. The first area of risk we highlight concerns the importance of maintaining a high-quality, sustainable publishing system that disseminates quality-assured research findings, and provides high standards of service to both authors and readers. We lay stress on this because we believe that such a system is a fundamental part of the ecology of research and the contribution it makes to society and the economy both in the UK and in the rest of the world.

8.49. A second area of risk relates to the achievability of real and effective increases in access to those publications, and of an accelerated transition to open access publishing funded by APCs. As we have stressed throughout this report, there are limits to what can be achieved in the UK alone, since although it is a leading research nation, its researchers are responsible for only a relatively small minority of the world’s publications. Effective increases in access—and moves towards open access publication—depend in large part on actions in other countries.

8.50. A third area of risk relates to costs, particularly during a transition period that is likely to last for some years. The transition will not be cost-free, especially for the UK as an early adopter. Our judgement is that the costs will not be huge, but we cannot be precise, since too many variables remain uncertain. Hence it is important that the costs are shared by all the key players in the system.

8.51. A final area of risk relates to the likelihood that for a period the UK will be ahead of much of the rest of the world in the adoption of open access publishing. This will need to be closely monitored, since the risks relate not just to costs for UK universities and research funders, but also to the substantial part of the research publishing business that is based in the UK, and the essential support it provides—not least through learned societies—to the performance of the UK research community.

8.52. But the biggest risk is to do nothing. We are in a period of rapid change in research publishing, and further change is on the way. As a result, current systems, policies and funding regimes have become unstable. We need to embrace and manage the change, and the risks associated with it; while seeking to sustain and develop what is valuable in a continually evolving system.

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1. Sue Thorn et al, ‘Learned societies and open access: key results from surveys of bioscience societies and researchers’ Serials, 22(1), 2009; Sally Morris et al, ‘Learned society members and open access’ Learned Publishing, 22 (3), 2009
2. David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder, 2007
3. Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK, JISC, 2011
4. Op.cit
5. The licence extensions considered were restricted to the HE sector and the NHS.
6. As we have noted, the annual running costs of UKPMC are around £600k; and that does not include the costs of ingest of articles deposited by publishers.