research (regardless of who the funder is) should be made as available as possible. Mike Taylor (2013a) puts it bluntly: ‘Publishing science behind paywalls is immoral.’
The combination of these practical and ethical arguments has made the existing practices and profits of academic publishers increasingly difficult to justify and maintain. As we shall see with other aspects of openness, the argument becomes irresistible. This is when the real battle for open begins, as we shall now see.
The Finch Report
The Finch report was the result of a working group set up by the UK government to make recommendations regarding open access publishing, led by Dame Janet Finch. The group published their report in July 2012, recommending a transition to an open access environment and backing the Gold route to publish (Finch Group 2012). The report’s recommendations were accepted by the Government, although a later Short Inquiry was held to examine some of the implementation details. A fund of £10M was made available to help universities transition to Gold route open access.
Although it is UK-focused, the Finch report represents a microcosm of some of the issues in open education, and so is worth considering in detail, as it is a pattern seen elsewhere. At first glance it looks like a remarkable success for the open access advocates. Not only has the recommendation come down strongly in favour of open access, but the Government has accepted this and even made funds available to support it. But a closer analysis of the report and implementation raises a number of concerns.
The first concern is the caution inherent in the project. The report acknowledges that some repositories such as arXiv (the physics pre-publication repository) have been successful but
