Friends: Both the Government and the academia in the UK are taking positive steps to bring all of UK science into open access. The UK Government has enlisted a celebrity like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame to promote open access. But in India neither the Government (the Ministers of HRD and S&T, the Secretaries of the different science departments, chairman of the UGC) nor the leaders in the academic world (with a few exceptions) have shown any enthusiasm for mandating open access to publicly funded research. I wrote a short article in the North Indian editions of Indian Express: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cancel-the-subscription/946723/0. I give below a blog post from 'scienceintelligence' and a short writeup from Wired.UK. Best wishes. Arun From http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/oa-free-gateway-to-uk-re... OA: free Gateway to UK Research The UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) recently released a report – titled ‘Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth’ – stating that all scientific research funded by British taxpayers will be made available online free of charge. The website, to be called ‘Gateway to Research’, will eventually incorporate research funded by other bodies, under the government’s plan.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           It has been observed that much of the high-energy physics research community currently uses a system of open access online publishing. The arxiv.org website, an online repository set up in 1991, offers almost all high-energy physics research for free. Despite this, established physics journals have reported no decrease in subscriptions.                                                                                                                                                                                        Janet Finch, former vice-chair ofKeele University,UK, has been assigned the responsibility to investigate how theUKmight set up something similar for all its taxpayer-funded science. She is expected to report in the first half of 2012 but, meanwhile, the UK Research Councils will be reminded that research papers from the work they fund should be made as widely available as possible.                                                                                                    The announcement is reportedly part of a growing trend towards open access, following the success of the free journals PLoS One and Nature Scientific Reports.  http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-an... http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/08/jimmy-wales-open-access-scien...  Jimmy Wales: charging to access publicly-funded research makes 'no sense' By Olivia Solon 08 May 12 It makes "no sense" to charge the taxpaying public to access academic research that they funded in the first place, argues Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Wales has been consulted by the government to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in the UK available online. The initiative was announced last week by universities and science minister David Willetts. He will help the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK Research Councils to develop new ways to distribute research data and studies. Wales told Wired.co.uk in an interview: "Particularly in a time of austerity, it makes no sense to charge the public (through their taxes) to support research, and then to charge them again to read the very research that they paid for. The authors don't get paid, the reviewers don't get paid, and yet the traditional journals sell for a lot of money. A nice spot at the trough, if you can get it, but it's time for us to disrupt things." Wales was talking about major academic publishers including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley-Blackwell, which charge high subscription charges, which libraries and other publicly funded bodies are forced to buy in very large bundles for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As a result, the publishers have impressive profit margins -- Elsevier's was 36 percent (making £724m on revenues of £2bn in 2010). Despite the fact that most other publishing companies have found their business models severely disrupted by the internet, academic publishers' stranglehold on some of the most respected journal titles and tight subscription model has meant it has taken a while for the status quo to be challenged. However, critical momentum has been growing and a protest called The Cost of Knowledge has emerged, with more than 11,000 researchers putting their name to a petition against Elsevier. They can pledge to refrain from doing editorial work for any of Elsevier's journals, from publishing their studies through the company or even refereeing any studies published through the company. Since the launch of the site, The Wellcome Trust has announced plans to withhold funding unless researchers make their publications freely available. Wales argues that an open access scheme such as the PLoS ONE model could be adopted in the UK. He says that he's happy for traditional journal publishers to compete in an open market with open access journals. "The competition will force prices down and they'll be forced to justify their existence to paying customers," he added. Open access journals tend to require the author to pay to have an article published once it has been peer reviewed. If the articles qualify, authors are asked to pay a fee of around £1000 to £3000. The fee goes towards coordinating the peer review process and managing the website. Wales believes that with the push towards making publicly funded research open access, traditional journal publishers will "probably" still have a sustainable business model, but "at a much reduced level of profits". He added: "Electric lights didn't put candle makers out of business, after all. But they surely changed the way they think about their market." Despite all of the talk about disrupting business models, Wales is most interested in how open access models could improve science. He says: "We now have the possibility for millions of people to read and learn from academic publications directly, through the web, allowing a much richer global conversation about knowledge. If, in order to participate in a dialogue with historians, I have to have the resources of a well-funded university library at my disposal, and the time to go there, then I'm essentially excluded. But if their work is available for me to read for myself... how wonderful." One of Wales' first challenges is to advise research councils on the "Gateway to Research" initiative, a site that will link to publicly-funded UK research all over the web. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.