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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
