Academic Spring

[The UK] Minister of State for Universities and Science announced last week that beginning in the near future all UK publicly funded academic research will be available on the Web free of charge to anyone anywhere in the world.  This is not a politician’s pipe dream; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has already been hired to set it up. Read More »

In almost every country in the world, research is supported by public funds. When researchers publish their results in academic journals, they do so for free. The results are also reviewed by peers for free. And journals often require researchers to give up their rights to these articles. Then, major publishers or learned societies sell their journals at exorbitant prices to libraries... which are also financed by public funds! It's a vicious circle in which taxpayers pay for the production and access to researchers while publishers and societies make profits of 30-45% before taxes. It's outrageous! Read More »

In one of the first moves to address these issues, the British government has unveiled plans to allow all publicly funded scientific research to be openly available by 2014... Read More »

The UK government is currently making a fundamental choice concerning access to the results of publicly funded research...Everyone agrees that these results should be freely available. So the decision the UK faces is not about whether access to scientific research should be free. Rather, it is about how this should be accomplished. Read More »

With faculty balking at the high price of traditional academic journals, can other digital publishing options get traction? Read More »

Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question.  Read More »