Executive Summary
This report tackles the important question of how to achieve better, faster access to research publications for anyone who wants to read or use them. It has been produced by an independent working group made up of representatives of universities, research funders, learned societies, publishers, and libraries. The group’s remit has been to examine how to expand access to the peer-reviewed publications that arise from research undertaken both in the UK and in the rest of the world; and to propose a programme of action to that end.
We have concentrated on journals which publish research results and findings. Virtually all are now published online, and they increasingly include sophisticated navigation, linking and interactive services. Making them freely accessible at the point of use, with minimal if any limitations on how they can be used, offers the potential to reap the full social, economic and cultural benefits that can come from research.
Our aim has been to identify key goals and guiding principles in a period of transition towards wider access. We have sought ways both to accelerate that transition and also to sustain what is valuable in a complex ecology with many different agents and stakeholders. The future development of an effective research communications system is too important to leave to chance. Shifts to enable more people to have ready access to more of the results of research will bring many benefits. But realising those benefits in a sustainable way will require co-ordinated action by funders, universities, researchers, libraries, publishers and others involved in the publication and dissemination of quality-assured research findings. .
1. The issue
Communicating research findings through journals and other publications has for over 350 years been at the heart of the scientific and broader research enterprise. Such publications have been remarkably successful in enabling researchers to build on the work of others, to scrutinise and refine their results, to contribute additional ideas and observations, and to formulate new questions and theories. They play a key role in the complex ecology of research, both for researchers themselves and for all those in society at large who have a stake or an interest in the results of their work
The internet has brought profound change across all sectors of society and the economy, transforming interactions and relationships, reducing costs, sparking innovation, and overturning established modes of business. Researchers and journal publishers were quick to embrace the digital and online revolutions. But there is a widespread perception, in the UK and across the world, that the full benefits of advances in technologies and services in the online environment have yet to be realised.
Most researchers in the higher education (HE) and related sectors and in large research-intensive companies have access to a larger number of journals than ever before, at any time of day, and wherever they can connect to the internet. But in the rapidly-developing online environment they want more: online access free at the point of use to all the nearly two million articles that are produced each year, as well as the publications produced in the past; and the ability to use the latest tools and services to analyse, organise and manipulate the content they find, so that they can work more effectively in their search for new knowledge. Better, faster communication can bring better research.
Most people outside the HE sector and large research-intensive companies—in public services, in the voluntary sector, in business and the professions, and members of the public at large—have yet to see the benefits that the online environment could bring in providing
