A proposal from Research Councils UK to make it mandatory for papers arising from council-funded research to be ‘deposited in openly available repositories (either institutional or subject-based) at the earliest opportunity’ could be the tipping point that takes open access into the mainstream, according to Professor Stevan Harnad of Southampton University.

RCUK’s position, if it becomes policy, would apply to all grants awarded from 1 October 2005.

Harnad, director of the Cognitive Sciences Centre at the University of Southampton and champion of the self-archiving approach to open access, explained the significance of proposals such as RCUK’s.

Only 15 per cent of the two and a half million articles published each year in peer-reviewed journals are currently self-archived, Harnad pointed out. The reason that this figure is not greater, he revealed, is the attitudes of researchers. ‘Many say they are busy. The fact is that their priorities are decided by their obligations. They will self-archive when their employer says they must.’

‘And’, he added, ‘if the UK moves first, all the rest of the dominoes [meaning other countries] will fall.’

The RCUK is not the first funder to use its leverage to promote open access: the Wellcome Trust – which funds £400 million worth of UK biomedical research each year – announced that from 1 October, all papers from new research projects must be deposited in the US repository PubMed Central or the UK PubMed Central (once created) within six months of publication. Existing grant holders will be bound by the same rules from 1 October 2006.

Implications

The implications of a global ‘domino effect’, should it happen, are far-reaching. Not only will UK researchers have free access to much of the world’s published research material, so will researchers in developing countries where institutions may struggle to pay subscription fees for traditional toll-based journals.

Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute in New York agreed that open access could bridge the knowledge divide: ‘Open access will allow scientists and academics in developing and transition countries to not only access the vital material that they need to conduct their research, but also to more efficiently contribute their important work to the global research community.’

Some major reshuffling will be required before global open access can become a self-sufficient system, however. The self-archiving route, however likely to offer the fastest results, still relies on the peer-review services of commercial and society journal publishers (as well as the newer, less numerous open access journals). But when funding agencies stipulate archiving in a third-party repository, they could prevent researchers from publishing in many toll-access journals, dramatically curtailing their choices.

Marike Westra of Elsevier explained. ‘Most publishers’ current policies, including Elsevier’s, explicitly prohibit public posting to third party web sites such as PubMedCentral. Currently, a very small number of publishers allow what Wellcome is proposing … authors will then have the choice of publishing in only one per cent of all publications,’ she said.