Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, November 12, 2004

More on the UK government response

Bobby Pickering, Open access publishing on the decline? Information World Review, November 11, 2004. Excerpt: 'The Government response was widely seen as a victory for the big academic publishers like Blackwell, Wiley, Nature and Reed Elsevier - none of whom issued any formal statement applauding the DTI-led attack on "author-pays" publishing. However, the UK's chief open access cheerleader, BioMed Central, was quick to criticise the stance taken. "The Government's response indicates that it regards as acceptable the status quo, in which traditional publishers take ownership of publicly-funded research findings and re-sell the right of access to those findngs. This situation, however, is strongly contrary to the interests of the research community and of the public at large".' (PS: Like most other articles on the government response, this one focuses on OA journals even though the original committee report focused on OA archiving.)