The UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) has released two reports that say open access (OA) to published scholarly research offers significant benefits to the UK.
The UK public sector already saves £28.6 million by using OA. The reports make it clear that both the public sector and the voluntary sector would see further direct and indirect benefits from increased access to UK higher education research publications.
The reports note that more Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations already use OA than pay for subscriptions, despite the fact that subscription journals make up the vast majority of journals on offer. The UK public sector spends £135 million a year, made up of subscriptions and time spent trying to find articles, accessing the journal papers it needs to perform effectively. Each extra 5 percent of journal papers accessed via OA on the web would save the public purse £1.7 million, even if no subscription fees were to be saved, say the reports.
The UK's voluntary and charitable sectors are also seen to benefit from OA to academic research. For survey respondents, the two most frequently mentioned barriers to accessing research were cost (80 percent) and lack of time (46 percent).
Making more research free at the point of access, and easier to search across, could produce significant savings, but could also lead to better decisions based on all the available evidence. This, in turn, offers benefits back to researchers, boosting the impact of their research by increasing its reach outside the academy, according to the reports.
These findings are borne out across all three reports in this series. This body of new, quantitative work is said to provide compelling evidence that increasing OA to research articles will have direct financial and practical benefits for the UK as a whole, benefits that are especially valuable in a time of austerity.
The reports make a number of recommendations around increasing awareness of OA in the public and private sectors. These include promoting the value of the information produced as a result of public research funding and exploring ways of improving relationships between academic researchers and workers in other sectors who rely on their research to do their jobs well.
The UK OAIG is working to add value to the work of the member organisations to increase the rate at which the outputs from UK research are available on OA terms, and these reports show how important that work is to the UK.
