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
