49
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[1] 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.
- ↑ 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.
