The UK is losing around £1.5bn annually because of its failure to embrace open access publishing, according to an open access advocate. Stevan Harnad, of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through what he views as the limitations of the current academic publishing environment....Prof Harnad calculates the value on the basis of the number of times research is cited by other researchers, known as research impacts. He claims that citation impacts are being lost to the UK each year by the inaccessibility of research papers. He revealed today that at least £1.5bn could be made each year through research impacts if a universal policy of self-archiving was adopted. "This is actually a conservative estimate," said Prof Harnad. "It also takes no account of the much wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/16/2005 07:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
