Professor Martin Hall

Companies of all sizes – from multi-nationals to SMEs – could all benefit in terms of cost and shortened development time for new products and services – and boost the UK economy by up to £100m a year.

A second report commissioned by the OAIG, the ‘Open Access Fees Report’ identifies several areas of improvement for universities, research partners and other key stakeholders, recommending a great degree of collaboration between them to build a more organised system for making researchers’ finding public.

Through constructive dialogue with publishers (many of whom charge for access to scientific papers), funders and librarians, the report’s authors recommend a clearer labelling system for articles that are open access and a central source containing information about papers that are available to all.

Coupled with the report on how business can benefit from more access to the latest knowledge being produced in the UK, the group is strongly advocating a rapid expansion of open access.

Professor Hall, as Chair of the OAIG, said: “During this consultation process there was a lot of agreement that open access journal publishing is making an important contribution, both to widening access to UK research, and to the success of UK publishers.  However, there is still practical work to do to smooth the way for researchers, universities, funders and publishers.  

“The ways forward identified in this report are both practical and the product of consensus. The UK Open Access Implementation Group will continue to press for expanded access to UK research, to meet our nation's need for innovation and growth based on a strong public science base."

The University of Salford has been leading the campaign under the leadership of Professor Hall for more public access to research, by making it mandatory for researchers to deposit their work into a central and public repository https://usir.salford.ac.uk/ 

The aim of the UK Open Access Implementation Group is to add value to the work of the member organisations, both strategically and practically, to increase the rate at which the outputs from UK research are available on open access terms.

Reports in full (PDF):

Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to Higher Education and Scholarly Research report

Open Access Fees Report