'Academic Spring' Continues To Grow in the U.K.

As the open access (OA) movement gathers steam and garners attention outside of the academic and library communities, David Willetts, the U.K. Minister of State for Universities and Science, contributed to the dialogue with a speech presented on May 2 at the Publishers Association’s annual meeting and a companion opinion piece published in The Guardian on May 1.

Most of his comments reiterated strong support from the U.K. government for making research outputs publicly accessible as a means of enabling innovation and emphasized that the question is no longer whether to make research publicly accessible, but how to do it in a viable, sustainable way. He did, however, introduce a new addition to the U.K. government’s strategy by bringing in Wikipedia’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, as an adviser, specifically to address issues of reusability and collaboration.

Willetts’ remarks are the latest commentary over the past few weeks that many have begun to dub “the academic spring” in the form of uproar from scholars, universities, policymakers, research funding agencies, and others demanding a new model for scholarly communication to fund research publications, disseminate research findings, and enable new types of research and analysis on research outputs.