The open access controversy continues with a recent parliamentary debate, which revealed that the UK government is still not convinced the so-called author pays open access publishing model will work.

The open access controversy continues with a recent parliamentary debate, which revealed that the UK government is still not convinced the so-called author pays open access publishing model will work. 

The debate followed the publication of the science and technology select committee’s report Scientific publications: free for all?, and precedes Research Council UK’s position statement on open access, which is expected to include a requirement for authors to deposit all published work in a freely-available repository at their institution.

In the debate Ian Gibson MP, past chairman of the select committee, said the government should pay for a network of such repositories, ’to provide a shop front for UK research’. Brian Iddon MP, a select committee member and RSC fellow added: ’Institutional repositories will be of benefit only if academics support them and if their funders insist on self-archiving in addition to publication in a reputable journal,’ and said that repositories would never replace open access to journals. 

Edward Vaizey MP cautioned against repositories and author-pays funding models. ’The government’s role is to protect the UK scientific community, not to intervene by, in effect, nationalising research publishing,’ he said. Other participants in the debate warned that learned societies might have to spend less on charitable and educational activities if they did not continue to make money from publishing.

Parliamentary under-secretary of state for trade and industry, Barry Gardiner represented the government in the debate. A successful and sustainable scientific publications market is vital to the research process, he said. ’To strongly endorse or reject the author pays approach would not be in the interests of allowing the market to evolve to meet the needs of authors.’

The debate also addressed the perceived problem of peer review losing its rigour in open access publishing. Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central’s publisher, said the MPs involved in the debate appeared to be ’uncritically repeating lines that had been fed to them by traditional publishers’. The idea that open access journals might be less thorough in their peer-review than traditional journals were groundless, he said. ’There is no reason that this should be so, nor is there any evidence that it is so.’ 

On the same day as the parliamentary debate, the Wellcome trust announced an agreement with Oxford University Press, Springer and Blackwell to make research articles that are published in their journals and funded by Wellcome freely available online.

Nobel laureate and scientist on the human genome project, John Sulston, recently joined the discussion when he signed an open letter to the Royal Society, criticising its stance on open access. ’The important thing is that we are now discussing the matter, as we should have done long ago,’ he told Chemistry World. Katharine Sanderson