The UK’s Wellcome Trust has reportedly announced its support for a campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared free online. Wellcome's move is expected to add weight to the campaign for open access to academic knowledge, which could lead to benefits across a broad range of research fields.
About 9,000 researchers have already signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the ‘academic spring’ by supporters. The involvement of the Wellcome Trust, which claims to be the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is expected to stimulate the movement by compelling academics it funds to publish in open online journals.
According to Wellcome Trust director Sir Mark Walport, the organisation is in the final stages of launching a high calibre scientific journal called eLife. The journal would compete directly with top-tier publications such as Science and Nature, which are seen by scientists as the premier locations for publishing. Unlike traditional journals, which cost British universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year to access, articles in eLife will be free to view on the web as soon as they are published. Further, the Wellcome Trust, which spends more than £600 million on scientific research a year, would soon adopt a more robust approach with the scientists it funds, according to Sir Mark. This is to ensure that results are freely available to the public within six months of first publication. Researchers who do not make their work open access in line with the Trust's policy could be sanctioned in future grant applications to the charity.
Sir Mark’s comments are seen to echo growing concerns from scientists who baulk at the rising costs of academic journals, particularly in a time of shrinking university budgets.
The majority of the world's scientific research, estimated at around 1.5 million new articles each year, is published in journals owned by large publishing companies including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Scientists submit manuscripts to the journals, which are sent out for peer review before publication. The work is then available to other researchers by subscription, usually through their libraries.
Publishers of the academic journals, which can cost universities up to €20,000 (£16,500) a year each to access, argue the price is necessary to sustain a high-quality peer review process.
The rising costs of journal subscriptions have led many scientists around the world to question the business models of the publishers, which can make profit margins of more than 35 percent through selling access to the results of publicly-funded research. Proponents for open access in science argue that research papers should be freely available to anyone who wants to read them, with the publication costs borne by the authors of the work, perhaps as part of the research grant that pays for their work.
The UK government has also signalled its support for open access. At the launch of the government's innovation strategy in December, David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, said he aspired to have all government-funded research published in the public domain.
