All UK taxpayer-funded scientific research could be made freely available by 2014 under new governme

All UK taxpayer-funded scientific research could be made freely available by 2014 under new government plans Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

www.dailymail.co.uk

Publicly funded scientific research will be made available for free to study by 2014, under controversial government plans which emerged today.

The revolutionary approach to accessing online articles will help researchers and boost the economy, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said.

It follows widespread calls for ‘open access’ to research papers, following complaints from academics that traditional journal publishers are charging too much.

British universities currently pay around £200million in annual subscription fees to publishers for access to research docume

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About time too!

These so called "Scientists" have been spending taxpayers money without much accountability for way too long and I'm sure there are tight links to the publishers of their work. I agree that it will be good from the point of view of feedback to the researchers and also that it would make the huge accumulation of knowledge more accessible to all, I just wish they'd stop spending on the silly stuff and concentrate more on what we NEED.

I couldn't give a stuff about what academic publishers might lose out on, if they are currently making £200 Million a year from university subscriptions, they have had a great run and made a huge fortune in their time. This change would help keep the money where it can be better used in the universities on research instead of the publishing of papers. Stuff the posh scientific institutes too if they rely on selling paper subscriptions, they are the ones who turned it into a business in the first place.

I imagine the £200 Million figure quoted for UK university subscriptions would swell considerably when all the other sources are added. Sure, pay for the academic publishers to create, store, organise and sell these documents but these publishers are parasites imo selling a very overpriced service back to those who funded the original work.

No wonder the human race is generally stoopid! Information seems to come with higher and higher prices these days and given the choice, people choose something else rather than knowledge.

I hope this move goes ahead and wonder what will come of the more freely available research, the biggest changes I hope for would be more accountability after research for complete wastes of funds comes to light and the imput of the average Joe (or Jane) who may bring something wonderful to the thing we call Science and possibly confront it when it gets greedy or pointless.

Cheers, nerb

ps....there's always a catch, let's see.....

www.dailymail.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

By 2014? I don't think Israel let alone U.S. will hold off from starting a world war for that long, everything is just starting to get heated up as it is right now...

Great! This must mean that the universities can lower their tuition fee's now!

2nd.

Originally posted by nerbot
About time too!

These so called "Scientists" have been spending taxpayers money without much accountability for way too long and I'm sure there are tight links to the publishers of their work.

did you miss the bit from the segment you quoted that it is academics who are fed up with the publishers??

reply to post by nerbot


Unless of course the research is classified,.
Universities dont pay to to view research papers of any kind
in my experience.

Does anyone really believe that ANY "Joe Blow" coming of the street will be able to request ANY public funded research documentation and it will be handed over just like that ? I certainly don't.

The only documentation that will be made publicly available by the government is documentation that has already been vetted by them and deemed "safe and innocuous" for the average citizen to access. However, as in the past, all the really "juicy" research will continue to remain compartmentalized, restricted and kept safely under lock.

So don't hold your collective breaths ...

I'm not sure people quite understand.

At present, most scientific papers are published in scientific journals - Nature and Science being the best known, but there are hundreds of more specialised ones as well.

In order to read these papers you have to subscibe to them - and that isn't cheap, just for one journal, let alone hundreds. However, anyone with money can currently subscibe to them, or go online and pay for access to any one paper.

But most people are unable or unwilling to pay to access them. As a consequence, the public are mostly restricted to reading media mis/re-interpretations of press releases and rarely get the chance to read what was actually said (albeit you need a dozen phds to understand most of the papers! ). This is why, for example, there is a ot of misunderstanding about the actual science behind climate change etc.

The proposal is that these papers should (and I and many others, including a number of scientsts I know have been arguing this for many years) be made freely available to the public - rather than, as at present, the public having to pay to read them. That is all.

Originally posted by AndyMayhew

In order to read these papers you have to subscibe to them - and that isn't cheap, just for one journal, let alone hundreds.

And the publishing companies get heavily criticised for forcing people to by "bundles" of subscriptions - you cannot just buy a subscription to a single relevant journal - you often have to buy subscriptions to some completely irrelevant ones too.

This way they get to sell lots of copies of journals that often have very limited readership - even by the standards of science journals! It's a total rort!

Simply making all such papers public will be a fantastic improvement - both for the public and for science.

reply to post by nerbot


Brilliant spot, thank you.

I am so happy with this news. Yes, it will attract cynics for a variety of reasons but i actually see this as a government doing something positive for the world for once (whilst admittedly still doing it for self serving reasons).

I actually didn't expect such a positive move from this coalition government - lets be honest, they may have made a few decent decisions but they have also made many that benefit nobody at all. I may be being quite "gushy" about this but it is because i am amazed - this is as close as a government gets to some genuine altruism.

Originally posted by Aloysius the Gaul

Originally posted by nerbot
About time too!

These so called "Scientists" have been spending taxpayers money without much accountability for way too long and I'm sure there are tight links to the publishers of their work.

did you miss the bit from the segment you quoted that it is academics who are fed up with the publishers??

No I didn't miss that segment.

My point was that it is the scientists who do the research and the publishers who publish it that are restricting what is available and for how much. This public funded research needs to be more available to more people and those that are given huge public grants need to be more accountable..

Anything funded by the taxpayer should be freely available, after all, we paid for it!
Any research funded by the taxpayer should also be available to everyone, not just a select few and certainly NOT through paid subscriptions to printed or online journals. Why should we pay to read the results of research done by people whose salaries we are paying, working in premises built and maintained by the taxpayer?