Large medical research funding bodies are fully committed to open access publishing. But although smaller charitable funders back the principle, they worry about the impact open access will have on their budgets and their funded researchers, reveals a qualitative study published in the online journal BMJ Open.
The findings come as Open Access Week (October 21-27), a global annual event to promote open access as the norm in scholarly publishing and research, celebrates its seventh year in business.
The premise of open access is that it provides free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and ideally, the right to use and reuse those results as desired, rather than restricting access behind a subscription pay wall. The UK leads the world on open access.
Semi-structured interviews about open access policies and preferences were carried out with 12 employees at 10 UK biomedical research funding bodies in the Spring of this year in the public, charitable, and commercial sectors.
The results showed that all three sectors back open access, but that while public and charitable funders have clear policies on it, commercial sector funders do not tend to.
Most funders are happy to support the "gold" route, whereby a study's publication is paid for out of a research grant to cover the journal's costs. This is the model used by BMJ Open and the other open access titles published by BMJ.
Funders however said that not all publishers have embraced open access; many are resisting it and are either reluctant to move away from traditional publishing or are using it purely as a means to boost income.
Open access also seemed to be part of a funder's overall mission - that is, improving health, healthcare, patient outcomes, and patients' lives - although for many of the charitable funders, this had to be balanced against other types of public communication and support for people living with medical conditions.
But the way in which a funder gets its income influences its attitude to open access. Charities, which rely on public donations, had to be able to justify their costs and make the best use of available cash for all their competing objectives.
But research funders across the board were worried about the escalating costs of open access as the gold route becomes more mainstream and the cost of publishing shifts from institutions to funders.
This is of particular concern to the smaller charitable funders, who have historically not covered off these costs in their overheads, and fear they will need to stump up the additional costs required.
