Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/The Current States of Access in the UK

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​4. The Current State of Access in the UK

The UK Research Base: Inputs and Outputs

4.1. UK research is distinctive in a number of ways. Gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) has grown only modestly as a share of GDP, and on that measure of research and development intensity the UK is significantly below most key comparator countries and international benchmarks.[1] But research in the UK is heavily concentrated in the HE sector: 28% of R&D is conducted in that sector, considerably higher than the averages for the G8 and the EU, and higher than that for all comparator countries except Canada. Conversely, the proportion of R&D conducted in the business sector, at 60%, is lower than the G8 average, although in line with the EU average; and the proportion funded by the business sector, at 45%, is markedly lower than the G8 average of 65%. The UK is strongly dependent on Government, charitable and overseas sources of funding for its R&D.

4.2. The UK’s longstanding focus on university-based research is reflected in the distribution of the 250k researchers in the UK, and in the kinds of outputs it produces. The UK is very successful in producing high-quality research publications, but relatively weak in producing other kinds of outputs such as patents.[2] Research does not operate like a production line where resources are put in at one end, and results leading to innovative products and services come out at the other end. Rather, it functions as an eco-system with complex and intricate interdependencies. Nevertheless, it is entirely appropriate that there should be repeated efforts to improve the connectivity between the research base in universities on the one hand, and the innovation system on the other; and improving access to published research findings is one way of facilitating such efforts. This section outlines the routes through which access is currently provided, and examines the levels of access for different sectors in the UK.

4.3. UK researchers are highly efficient and productive: among the top five research countries (US, China, Japan and Germany alongside the UK), they generate more articles, more usage, and more citations per researcher and per unit of research spend than their competitors. The rise in the number of articles published by UK authors has not been as fast as in the very high-growth countries such as India and Brazil mentioned in the previous section; and since 2006 it has been lower, at 2.9% a year, than the world average. As a result, the UK’s share of the global total of articles fell from 6.7% in 2006 to 6.4% in 2010. Nevertheless, UK researchers’ rate ​of productivity is more than 50% above the world average.[3] Moreover, citations to UK articles increased between 2006 and 2010 by 7.2% a year, faster than the world average of 6.3%. Hence the UK share of global citations rose from 10.5% to 10.9%; and its share of the top 1% of most-highly-cited papers was second only to the US, at 13.8% in 2010.[4]

4.4. It is notable also that the UK research base is highly mobile: there is considerable movement both to and from the UK, and part of the explanation for the UK’s success is that it attracts internationally-mobile researchers. UK researchers are also more likely than those in almost any other major research nation to collaborate with colleagues overseas: almost half (46%) of the articles published by UK authors in 2010 included a non-UK author.

Communication and Access Routes

4.5. A report in 2011 estimated that universities in the UK spent £112m on subscriptions to journals, a further £52m on managing and providing access to them, and £11m on article processing charges for open access journals.[5] For the UK as a whole, expenditure on subscriptions is estimated to be £150m. For individual universities and other institutions, the expenditure on such items represents a major element in their total expenditure on libraries. Indeed, other elements of library expenditure have been squeezed in order to sustain journal subscriptions, in a context where library budgets as a whole have been under pressure. The proportion of overall university expenditure devoted to libraries fell from 3.5% in the mid-1990s to 2.7% in 2009. Nevertheless, the figures represent a small fraction of the UK’s total expenditure on research and development (£25.9bn in 2009-10) or of Government expenditure (£10.4bn) or even of the expenditure of the Research Councils and Higher Education Funding Councils (£5.5bn).[6]

4.6. In return for these expenditures, access to the research literature is provided via a number of routes. The great majority of journals are still published under the subscription model, and access requires the purchase of a licence. Licences are also required for access free at the point of use to e-books, while print books are of course purchased. Other routes include various PPV or transactional mechanisms; and material that is available in open access journals or via repositories.

4.7. The growth of provision to underpin open access – both through repositories and through open access journals – has been significant over the past decade; but it is ​by no means evenly spread. The UK is among the leaders in the provision of repositories: together with the US and Germany it accounts for well over a third of the global total. An analysis of leading open access journals suggests even higher levels of concentration, with over 60% of the articles published in PLoSOne and 46% of the articles in BioMed Central journals coming from those three countries.

4.8. In terms of disciplines, recent studies show marked differences in the take-up of open access publishing, and of making articles available in repositories. It has been estimated[7] that open access journals accounted in 2009 for around 14% of articles published worldwide in medicine and the bio sciences, as compared to 5% in engineering. On the other hand, the proportion of articles published that year available from repositories ranged from over 20% in physics and astronomy, and 26% in earth sciences, down to between 6% and 8% in medicine and the biosciences. These differences reflect a number of factors, including the uneven spread of open access journals in different disciplines, with a concentration in medicine and the life sciences; the availability of well-established subject-based repositories and the tradition of making pre-prints available in subjects including physics; and the uneven spread of funding for open access in different disciplines, with the Wellcome Trust and the NIH having a significant influence in medicine and the life sciences. In the humanities, where much research is undertaken without specific project funding, open access publishing has hardly taken off at all; and it is patchy in the social sciences, for similar reasons.

4.9. Hence it is important to review each of the different routes through which access is provided, in addition to the open access options.

Licensed access

4.10. As a result of the big deals negotiated between publishers and academic libraries, most researchers and others who are members of universities and other major research institutes (including those in the business sector) have online access to significant proportions of the licensed literature. It is important to note, however, that while access, printing and downloading is allowed for non-commercial research and private study, copyright restrictions mean that it is typically not possible to copy or reproduce licensed content for other purposes. This restricts the use tools and services that might enable researchers to manipulate, organise and share information from a wide range of sources.

4.11. For staff and students in the larger and well-endowed research-led institutions, access is provided to virtually all the major journals in their fields, and on average to over 70 per cent of all the relevant journals. For those in smaller and less research-intensive institutions, without the resources to purchase access to large bundles of titles through big deals, the proportions on average are much lower. Subscription to individual titles is more common in such circumstances; but for anyone who is not a member of an institution that has purchased at least some ​licences, access through this route is nil. Levels of access for different sectors, and restrictions on use and re-use, are examined further below.

Pay-per-view

4.12. When licensed access is not available, payment for access to individual items, or pay-per-view (PPV), is an option; but it has not proved especially attractive in the online environment. A decade ago, the British Library’s provision through its document supply service constituted a major route for access to material not available in the library of your own university or other organisation. The service still operates; but the advent of online access and publishers’ big deals for university libraries has led to a steep decline in the numbers of articles and other material delivered through it, for both UK and overseas customers. Publishers’ own PPV services have not proved widely attractive; nor as yet have new services such as DeepDyve,[8] which provides access on a time-limited rental basis for web browser viewing, rather than for downloading, shown signs as yet of generating large volumes of business.

4.13. A key problem for PPV and similar services is the cost to the user. The cost of PPV for a single article from many journals typically ranges from £15 to £20. Users are often reluctant to pay such fees, especially when they may be uncertain from the information given in an abstract whether the article is indeed relevant to their needs. Moreover, the transaction costs of paying for access to relevant content from many different journals and publishers present a significant barrier to many individuals and organisations. Both transaction and cash costs may be lower for researchers in universities and other non-commercial organisations who can use the British Library’s document supply service at ‘library privilege’ rates, but even then the cost of a single item where supply is guaranteed within 24 hours is £16. Rental via DeepDyve is much cheaper, at US$1-5, but the inability to download may be too restrictive for many users.

Repositories

4.14. A third route to access is through repositories. There are over two hundred repositories active in the UK: over 150 institutional repositories and the rest classified as either disciplinary, Governmental, or ‘aggregating’.[9]

4.15. The largest institutional repository in the UK, according to the number of records contained, is the University College London (UCL) Discovery repository, with over 225,000 items, followed by the Cambridge D-Space repository with over 190,000 items. Other institutions in the top ten include Southampton, where the Eprints repository has over 82,000 items; Glasgow, with 52,000; Aberdeen with ​41,000 and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, with 30,000. The RepUK service[10] shows 1.8m records in UK institutional repositories.

4.16. Institutions have established repositories for many different reasons, including providing a showcase for their research on the one hand, and establishing a mechanism for creating a central record of their research outputs (with the forthcoming Research Evaluation Framework (REF) exercise very much in mind) on the other. Only a minority of repositories have clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation. Differences in the strategies and policies that are in place are reflected also in the nature and scope of the contents of the repositories. In practice patterns of deposit are patchy.

4.17. The UCL repository, for example, contains a wide array of reports, posters, working papers, theses, conference presentations, designs, exhibition materials, performances and so on, in addition to journal articles. And while journal articles constitute the larger part of the contents (162,000 items, more than 70% of the total), the great majority—98%—of them consist of metadata records only: as of 6 March 2012, the UCL repository included 2,890 full text articles, 46 of them published in 2011. Similar patterns can be seen across next three largest institutional repositories: the Southampton repository, for example, has records for over 4,500 articles of various kinds published in 2010, but only just over 25% of those are currently available in full text, a figure that will rise to c35% when embargo periods lapse.[11]

4.18. Moreover, it is important to note that, as with articles in subscription-based journals, copyright and other intellectual property rights subsist in the material deposited in repositories. Hence again, while access, printing and downloading are allowed for the purposes of non-commercial research and private study, users are generally not allowed to copy or reproduce, or to use many of the latest tools to manipulate and mine the contents of repositories.

4.19. It is difficult at present to get consolidated or detailed information on levels of usage of the material in institutional repositories.[12] Of the larger repositories, there were 585,000 downloads from the Discovery repository at UCL in 2011, but usage of the smaller repositories is at much lower levels.[13] At UCL, nine of the top 50 ​items downloaded in 2011 were published journal articles, but it is notable that they tended to be relatively old: the top two articles were published in 2001 and 2002 respectively.

4.20. For researchers in a number of disciplines, however, subject or discipline-based repositories are a more important part of the landscape: a place where they go for information, to see what’s new, to share early findings with their peers, and to look for collaborators, as well as to deposit their own articles. Provision is very patchy, and there are many gaps. But for researchers in a number of fields, subject-based repositories constitute an important element in their daily workflows.

4.21. Among the most notable of such services are ArXiv, predominantly but not solely for the physics community; CiteSeerx for the computer and information science communities; RePec for the economics community; the SSRN for the social science community more generally; and PubMedCentral for the biomedical and life sciences communities.

  • ArXiv[14] is a preprint repository, for papers before they are submitted to a journal for peer review and publication. It contains c735,000 full text articles, and is growing at about 75,000 articles a year. There is minimal filtering of incoming papers for quality control purposes. There are about a million downloads a week.
  • CiteSeerx[15] harvests documents and other material such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software; and it creates a citation index that can be used for literature search and evaluation. It has over 1.5 million documents with nearly 1.5 million unique authors and 30 million citations.
  • Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)[16] is a collaborative service at the heart of which is a database of working papers, journal articles and software. In addition to working papers (which are disseminated among economists much more commonly than in most other research communities) it provides information about 692,000 journal articles, 629,000 of which are downloadable. But it does not itself host or provide access to the articles; rather, it provides metadata and links to documents it harvests from archives across the world. It estimates about 700,000 downloads a month.
  • The Social Science Research Network (SSRN)[17] consists of a number of subject-based networks and encourages the early distribution of research results by soliciting and publishing submitted abstracts of research papers. It has agreements with a wide range of journals, publishers, and institutions. The SSRN eLibrary consists of an abstracts database of over 380,000 items and a collection of some 315,000 full text PDFs. It is widely used in the social science community, and has over 8m downloads a year.

​

  • PubMedCentral (PMC)[18] is a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the access policies of the NIH and other research funding agencies. Free access is a requirement, but publishers can delay the release of their material for twelve months after publication. There are currently 2.4m full-text articles, growing at about 10% a year. Most PMC articles have a corresponding entry in PubMed, the database of citations and abstracts which provides links to full-text articles at journal websites. UKPMC[19] was established in partnership with PMC in 2007. In addition to access to most of the content in PMC itself, it provides a manuscript submission system which allows publishers and researchers to submit articles for inclusion in the UKPMC collection, along with information about researchers and research grants. Free access is a requirement, but publishers can delay release of their material for up to twelve months. Over 35,000 articles have been deposited in UKPMC since it was established, the great majority by publishers; and 200,000 visits (5,000 searches) are made each day.

4.22. A number of smaller-scale subject repositories have been established in the UK, including the PhilPapers[20] service which provides a directory of online academic philosophy, with metadata and links more than full-text. The OpenFields service[21] is an online library designed to meet practitioner and student demand for knowledge that supports and stimulates the development of land-based industries.

4.23. In sum, it is clear that a fairly comprehensive infrastructure of institutional repositories has been developed in the UK, and that they have the potential to fulfil a number of purposes in providing a shop window for the research activities and outputs of their host institutions, and links with research management systems, as well as an alternative route for access to published research findings. Despite the best efforts of repository managers and librarians, however, rates of deposit and usage of published materials remain fairly low; and a number of issues will need to be addressed if institutional repositories are to fulfil a bigger and more effective role in the research communications landscape. We consider those issues later in this report.

4.24. Some subject-based repositories, on the other hand, have developed a significant role for themselves in a number of subject areas, with high rates of deposit and use[22] enabling them to reach a scale which means that researchers find them difficult to ignore. Overall, however, the provision of subject-based repositories remains patchy, with many subject areas lacking them entirely, or with small-scale repositories which have not reached the critical mass to make them effective routes to access.

​ Open access journals

4.25. There is no published analysis of the numbers of open access articles published by authors from different countries; but analysis of the SCOPUS database suggests that authors with an affiliation to an institution in the UK were responsible for over 11% of the articles published in PLoS One in 2011. Similar figures apply to other major open access publishers such as BioMedCentral. Such figures are considerably higher than the 6% of the global total of all articles for which UK authors are listed; and the conclusion must be that authors from the UK are among the leaders—alongside colleagues in the US and Germany—in adopting open access publishing.

Monographs

4.26. In many areas of the humanities and social sciences, monographs and edited collections of essays (henceforth, monographs is the term used to cover both) are regarded as the most important channel for communicating the results of research, both to members of the research community and more widely. Monographs are also in many cases the standard against which the performance and standing of researchers is judged. But there has for many years been concern about the decline of the monograph, both in the UK and across the world. Hard evidence is difficult to come by, but it is clear that print runs have declined, that prices have risen, and that libraries have found it difficult to sustain the development of their collections of monographs. UK university libraries’ expenditure on books has declined significantly since 2006 in real terms, while expenditure on serials has increased.[23]

4.27. Digitisation has made a significant impact in improving access to books that are out of copyright. Alongside major international initiatives such as Google Books and Eighteenth Century Collections Online,[24] individual libraries have made significant efforts to digitise material in special collections, and to expose metadata to the major search engines. Copyright restrictions constitute a major impediment, however, to digitisation and online access to more recent material, including publications (‘orphan works’) for which the rights-holder cannot be traced. The Hargreaves Review[25] last year made various recommendations to address some of the issues that libraries face in improving digital access to their collections, including orphan works; and the Government has responded positively to those recommendations.[26] Much remains to be done, however, if we are to develop in the UK, and internationally, a more effective regime to address the issues highlighted by Hargreaves.

​ 4.28. Despite the progress made in retrospective digitisation, the shift to digital formats and online access has been much slower with books than with journals. Relatively few research monographs are as yet available online, and there has been relatively little progress towards the publication of open access. For the health of research in the humanities and social sciences, the difficulties now faced by authors and publishers in developing a secure future for monographs is a matter of concern.

4.29. The EU-funded OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) project[27] is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable OA publication model for academic books in the humanities and social sciences. It is examining publishing and business models, as well as the publishing process itself in an OA context. In the UK, JISC Collections and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have recently established an OAPEN-UK project[28] in partnership with publishers, research councils, authors, researchers and institutions. It is designed as a pilot to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data which will be evaluated to help stakeholders better understand the challenges, and the developments necessary to support open access research monographs.

4.30. Publication fees as yet play relatively little part in the funding of open access monographs, not least because there are no arrangements in place from funders to meet them. Instead, much of the small amount of open access monograph publishing at present depends on subsidies from universities and other bodies that provide cash, facilities, equipment, personnel, or all four. A number of university presses in the US are now operating in collaboration with the university library, which provides the funding to support publishing. In some cases this funding derives from grants from bodies such as the Mellon Foundation. In Australia, the Australian National University Press has established an e-press initiative under which 350 titles have been published to date, along with a print-on-demand service; and other Australian universities have expressed interest in launching similar systems.

4.31. In many cases, free full-text open access editions are provided alongside print-on-demand (POD) editions for which payment is required; and in some cases services such as full browsing functions, full-text search, navigation tools, multimedia content etc. are charged for. The aim is then that such charges should defray, in whole or in part, the costs of publication. A more radical suggestion is that a system should be established under which a consortium of libraries would pool funds to pay for the fixed costs of monographs selected by the members of the consortium. Publishers would submit proposed titles to the consortium, which would disseminate this information to member libraries who would then decide what to purchase, and cover the first-digital-file production costs. Publishers would then make the monograph available open access in a sub-optimal format, again ​with POD and enhanced services or multimedia content available but charged-for.[29] The benefit to publishers and authors of such a system would be to reduce risk, enabling publishers to concentrate on service provision and added value. The benefit to participating libraries is that they would secure access to a value-added version at a discount, as distinct from other organisations and individuals who would have to pay for anything other than the open access version. Whether such a system, or some variant of it, is feasible is not yet clear; but we believe that it is in the interests of the research community to support further experimentation in finding ways to promote the development and use of e-monographs in general, and open access monographs in particular. Until that happens, it is difficult to encompass monographs within the discussion about promoting wider access to publications.

Access and use: gaps and barriers

4.32. In one sense, everyone in the UK can gain access to any of the published findings of research conducted in the UK or worldwide, so long as they are aware of its existence, they have access to the internet, and they (or someone else on their behalf) are prepared to pay for it. Gaps are therefore inseparable from the notion of barriers to access: gaps occur when someone is unable to access and use publications relevant to their work or other needs, because the publication is not available from sources that they are able or willing to use. Some of the barriers that arise include

  • lack of awareness or inability to discover publications that are available;
  • lack of membership of a library that has purchased a licence;
  • lack of access to appropriate hardware and software;
  • content being made available only in an inconvenient format (e.g. in print or a flat PDF file),or only after an embargo period;
  • publications available in a version other than the version of record;
  • content available only in a library, rather than anywhere with internet access
  • a requirement to pay for access an amount the user considers disproportionate;
  • conflict between author or publisher rights and the desired use of the content;
  • digital rights or technical protection technologies that prevent the desired use of the content.[30]

​ 4.33. Of these barriers, researchers and others find the lack of licensed access, and a requirement to pay for access to individual items, by far the most irksome. Thus for the purposes of this report, we focus on access and usability free at the point of use. The point was well put by Antonio Panizzi, the future Principal Librarian of the British Museum Library (now the British Library) in 1836:

‘a poor student [should] have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect’[31]

Levels of access by sector

4.34. Higher Education. Access to journals in the HE sector is provided primarily through licences negotiated with seventeen major publishers and a further twenty-two smaller publishers under the National Electronic Site Licensing (NESLi2) initiative administered by JISC Collections.[32] Together those licences cover around 8,000 of the major online journals; and they enable universities to subscribe at discounted prices to titles that were not formerly in their portfolios. Universities decide whether or not to subscribe to licences under the initiative, and the costs to each institution vary according to its size and also to its historic level of expenditure with particular publishers in the past. Some universities still subscribe to their own selection of titles, outside the NESLi2 initiative; and for publishers not covered by the initiative, universities have to negotiate individual deals.

4.35. The ‘opt-in’ system inherent in the NESLi2 initiative means that individual universities are in control of decisions about the scope of their collections, and their expenditure. Since the end of the Pilot Site Licensing Initiative in 1998, there has been no attempt at a licence covering the whole HE sector in the UK and funded by top-slicing of funds that would otherwise be distributed to individual universities.[33] There are thus considerable differences in the numbers of publications accessible to staff and students in different institutions.

4.36. Current levels of access in the UK are difficult to calculate precisely. But it is clear that researchers and other members of large research-intensive universities and major research institutions (including research-intensive companies in the commercial sector) enjoy the highest levels of access to journal contents. For members of smaller and less-research-intensive institutions, levels of access are considerably lower. Nevertheless, a recent study found that over 93% of researchers drawn from across UK universities and colleges said that they had easy ​or fairly easy access to published research papers; and a large majority said that access had improved over the past five years.

4.37. But many researchers—especially those in smaller and less research-intensive institutions—complain that they do not have access to a sufficiently-wide range of titles; and a significant minority (5%) describe their current level of access as ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ difficult.[34] A similar-sized minority (5%) also reported a recent difficulty in securing access, the most frequent of which was the need to pay for the article they wanted. Since most were unwilling to pay, they adopted a range of coping strategies, the most frequent of which was to give up and move onto something else.

4.38. These findings should be set in a context, however, where levels of satisfaction with access to other kinds of information content, including conference papers, books, technical reports, trade publications, research data and theses—were very much lower; and the difficulties encountered in gaining access to relevant material much more frequent. In sum, levels of access to published research outputs are good in many universities, but far from comprehensive across the HE sector as a whole; there are particular problems with access to conference proceedings and monographs; and the restrictions on use and re-use imposed by publishers limit the ability of researchers to make use of journal contents to best effect.

4.39. Health. On the basis of the available data from the NHS, surveys undertaken by the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU), and estimates from publishers, the Open Road report in 2011[35] estimated that on average across the NHS, about a third of relevant journals were available free at the point of use. That includes core content in the form of full-text databases (not necessarily including current content) procured in England by NHS Evidence (part of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), as well as print and electronic content procured locally.[36] The estimate should therefore be regarded as tentative.

4.40. Staff in the NHS show lower levels of satisfaction than staff in universities with their access to journal articles and other content; and universities with medical schools repeatedly report problems with different systems and levels of access for university and NHS staff. JISC Collections is leading a pilot programme to provide access to content from major publishers to five Academic Health Science Centres (AHSCs) that were established in London, Cambridge and Manchester in 2009. The programme allows the universities at the heart of the AHSCs to extend to their partner NHS organisations access to all their subscribed content from five major ​publishers. One of the issues that this initiative confronts is the difference in procurement systems between the HE sector and the NHS.

4.41. Government. Surveys by LISU and others suggest that there are some six hundred libraries in Government departments and related bodies that subscribe to journals, each subscribing to c500-600 titles. On that basis, the Open Road study estimated that on average across central Government and its agencies, some 17% of relevant articles are available free at the point of use. That figure includes those journals and articles that are available on open access terms, and the licensed access to relevant specialist material purchased by agencies such as the Met Office and the Royal Botanic Gardens. Nevertheless, it is clear that access to relevant literature is limited. JISC Collections has had approaches from some Departments which would like to have access to research material, particularly in the areas of social science and economics; but no action has been taken to date. The British Library has also sought to raise awareness among researchers in Government Departments of its holdings of the journal literature and other resources.

4.42. Interview evidence from a recent study[37] suggests that lack of access poses problems for many individuals and organisations in the public sector, and that it may mean that advice and inputs to policy-making are delayed or incomplete. The available evidence suggests that licensing and the availability of access free at the point of use in the local government sector is minimal, beyond that part of the literature which is available on open access terms.

4.43. Business. Large R&D-intensive companies, particularly in the pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors, need easy access to relevant journals, and spend considerable sums on licence agreements with publishers. Some of them are also active in securing agreements with publishers to enable them to use text-mining technologies to analyse and process the contents of journals in order to extract relevant information, to manipulate it, and to generate new knowledge and ideas.

4.44. For other companies—particularly the large and diverse SME part of the sector—levels of access are much more varied and problematic. One of the key issues is lack of awareness and understanding of the research literature; and of course for many SMEs, articles in journals will relatively seldom be of direct relevance to their work. They tend to rely instead on professional and trade publications, which may themselves on occasion report on the latest findings circulating in the research community.

​ 4.45. Small firms are often regarded as driving innovation, although the evidence suggests they perform less innovation than large firms across a range of dimensions. Very few SMEs undertake R&D activities: around 2.7% of those engaged in manufacturing, and 0.6% of those engaged in services.[38] In certain high technology sectors and in the creative industries, however, SMEs have been important drivers of innovation; and those SMEs that do innovate achieve a higher average return on investment and tend to have better commercial success. The combination of new technologies and increasing consumer demand for bespoke products has allowed SMEs to narrow the innovation gap with large firms. But size still matters, and the risks for SMEs, and the barriers they have to overcome, are more acute than for larger companies. Hence anything that can be done to lower the barriers will be especially helpful to them.

4.46. Recent reports[39] suggest that people in the commercial sector find access to trade journals easier than to research journals. Moreover, while access to journals has improved significantly in recent years, those within the commercial sector who regard them as important sources of information for their work report that access on average is variable, with a significant minority saying that it is poor. And more than half report some recent difficulty in obtaining an article relevant to them. Like their colleagues in the HE sector, they PPV arrangements as costly and difficult, although many of them use PPV on a regular basis. ‘Walk-in’ access at a local university is inconvenient and time-consuming, and in any case many universities have found it difficult to implement in an effective way.

4.47. Voluntary sector. A range of organisations in the voluntary sector have interests in gaining access to research findings, but a recent report[40] indicates that they tend to rely on reports from research organisations and Government departments more than the research reported in journals. They tend also to rely on intermediaries such as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations who unpack and synthesise research to make it more accessible and pertinent to their needs. Nevertheless, they do make use of journal articles, although it has not been possible to generate estimates of either their expenditure on licences, or the level of coverage.

4.48. Cost is a fundamental constraint on the sector’s ability to access research, but the multi-disciplinary interests of organisations in the sector also present a barrier, since it can be hard to decide which journals are the most relevant. Overall, limited access to research literature means that organisations can find it difficult to keep up to date, and that may affect the quality of the services they offer. Such difficulties ​may be exacerbated in some organisations by lack of expertise in assessing and interpreting the latest research findings.

4.49. The general public. Very few public libraries provide access to journals, and then only to a very small number—such as Nature or the British Medical Journal—in printed form. For most members of the public, the only way in which they can gain access to journals is through the walk-in service provided by some university libraries.[41] During the course of our work, however, a proposal was developed to provide walk-in access to the majority of journals through the public library system. Such an initiative would mark a welcome step-change in access for many members of the public; and we consider in Section 7 how it might operate to best effect.

Access and understanding

4.50. Access on its own does not necessarily make for effective communication. Most journal articles, conference presentations and monographs are written in specialist language that even researchers in related disciplines may find difficult to understand or interpret. Researchers in all disciplines, like other professionals, depend on specialist language to communicate their findings precisely and accurately. But some researchers themselves have complained of articles so poorly-written that it is impossible to replicate the work, or in the worst cases fully to understand what is being reported.[42]

4.51. For non-specialists, the problem is more widespread and more basic. In the early days of journals, the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions were a channel for communication not just between researchers, but also with a wider audience. Nowadays, however, non-specialists face two key problems. First, the huge growth in the volume of research and of journals means that—without effective guidance on the behaviours and norms that underlie the research communications process—it is difficult for non-specialists to navigate their way around the research literature, or to identify authoritative material that is relevant to their needs. There is thus a need for high-quality guidance for non-specialists on the nature, scope and norms used by researchers in publishing their results. We believe that there are opportunities for the development of innovative services here.

4.52. Second, as the language in which researchers communicate with each other has become more specialised, so it has become more difficult for non-specialists to understand. Nowadays relatively few of the articles published in journals can be said to constitute effective means of communication with non-specialist audiences. If access to research results is to be increased so that they are understandable and usable by people beyond the research community, research publications need to be accompanied by publications that present research findings in non-specialist language. Funders, universities and learned societies—as well as researchers ​themselves—all have roles to play in facilitating and promoting the dissemination and communication of research in this way.

  1. ↑ In 2010, the UK’s R&D intensity was 1.8%, compared with the G8 average of 2.4% and the OECD average of 2.7%. The UK ranked 16th among OECD countries. Figures in this paragraph are taken from International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base -2011: A report prepared for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, Elsevier 2011
  2. ↑ Ibid.
  3. ↑ It should be noted that it is sometimes argued that high rates of research productivity in the leading research countries are achieved in part by establishing dependency cultures in other countries.
  4. ↑ ibid
  5. ↑ Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications. RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK and JISC, 2011.See also Annex E to this report. In addition to these costs, the UK also incurs significant costs in peer review of published articles. An earlier report—Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, RIN 2008—estimated that the time spent by UK peer reviewers in 2007 represented a cash cost of £165m.
  6. ↑ SET Statistics 2011, Department for Business Innovation and Skills.
  7. ↑ Bo-Christer Bjork et al, Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009, PLoSOne, 5(6), 2010
  8. ↑ http://www.deepdyve.com/
  9. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the figures in this and the following three paragraphs are taken from the OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories, http://www.opendoar.org/
  10. ↑ http://repuk.ukoln.ac.uk
  11. ↑ A survey of 68 repositories by the Repository Support Project based at Nottingham University found that an average of 56% of records had full text associated with them in some way; but that figure includes reports, working papers, theses and so on as well as journal articles http://www.rsp.ac.uk/pmwiki/index.php?n=Institutions.Summary
  12. ↑ The Publisher and institutional repository usage statistics project (PIRUS) is developing standardised COUNTER-compliant article-level usage statistics; but it is not yet operational. Until it is, we have to rely on applications such as Google Analytics. See http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/tiki-index.php
  13. ↑ At Salford, downloads from the repository, which contains about 2,500 full-text items, are currently running at about 1500 a month.
  14. ↑ http://arxiv.org/
  15. ↑ http://csxstatic.ist.psu.edu/about
  16. ↑ http://repec.org/
  17. ↑ http://www.ssrn.com/
  18. ↑ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
  19. ↑ http://ukpmc.ac.uk/
  20. ↑ http://philpapers.org/
  21. ↑ http://www.openfields.org.uk/
  22. ↑ http://www.rsp.ac.uk/documents/get-uploaded-file/?file=Swan%20-%20RSP%20June%202012%20web.pptx
  23. ↑ Trends in the finances of UK higher education libraries: 1999-2009, RIN, 2010 , http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/library_trends_report_screen.pdf
  24. ↑ http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/eighteenth-century-collections-online.aspx
  25. ↑ http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf
  26. ↑ http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipresponse-full.pdf
  27. ↑ http://www.oapen.org/home
  28. ↑ http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/overview/
  29. ↑ For a detailed list of OA monograph publishing models, with examples, see http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_book_business_models. The proposal from Frances Pinter, formerly of Bloomsbury Academic, for library consortia to cover first copy production costs is outlined in a presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/C_C_I/frances-pinterthe-future-of-the-academic-monograph.; and in a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niyYWVa2w6w.
  30. ↑ . Access to scholarly content: gaps and barriers, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium and JISC, 2011
  31. ↑ Cited in Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp296-7.
  32. ↑ For a description of the NESLI2 initiative, see http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/nesli2/
  33. ↑ There have been recent moves to implement licences that provide access to staff and students in a range of institutions, notably in Scotland under the SHEDL initiative. See Section 7 below.
  34. ↑ Access to scholarly content: gaps and barriers, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium and JISC, 2011
  35. ↑ Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK and JISC, 2011.
  36. ↑ In Scotland, NHS Education for Scotland provides over 6000 electronic journals approximately 5000 electronic books, and over 20 bibliographic databases both to NHS staff and to social services staff in local authority, voluntary and private sectors, via the Knowledge Network platform (www.knowledge.scot.nhs.uk ).
  37. ↑ Rightscom. Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research Outputs to the Public Sector, Report for the Open Access Implementation Group, , 2012. The study also suggests that researchers in the UK public sector (including the NHS as well as local and central Government) download 21 million articles a year, at a cost in in time and access fees (including PPV) of about £135m; and that increasing the number of articles available on open access terms by 25% would save the public sector £29m a year. But the evidential basis for those calculations is meagre at best. The estimate of 101k researchers in the public sector cannot be reconciled to OECD statistics, nor to the source given for civil service statistics; and the estimates for the number of downloads and for the time spent are based on only 53 responses to a survey for which the response rate is not given.
  38. ↑ BIS Economics Paper No. 15, Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth, 2011, pp 100-101.
  39. ↑ Access to Scholarly Content: gaps and barriers, RIN, PRC and JISC, 2011; Mark Ware Consulting Ltd, Access by UK small and medium-sized enterprises to professional and academic information, PRC, 2009
  40. ↑ Office for Public Management, Benefits of open access to scholarly research for VCS organisations, JISC 2012, forthcoming.
  41. ↑ For the difficulties associated with access through this route, see Public Access to Digital Content, RIN, 2006.
  42. ↑ Access to scholarly content: gaps and barriers, RIN, PRC, JISC, 2011
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