In recent months it’s started to look like the UK is getting serious about open access: several high profile scientists and members of the government have spoken out in support of making publicly funded research openly available. Yesterday Science Minister David Willetts announced plans to enforce open access in the UK by 2014 in an interview with The Guardian:

Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

It’s everything we ever wanted! Or is it?

The catch lies in the implementation of such a scheme. Publishing still costs some money, and several models are commonly discussed in the context of open access. The proposed plans in the UK seem to envisage a “gold model”, where the publication costs are transferred to the science community, who could face charges of ~£2000 for the publication of a paper, which will then be freely available to anyone and everyone. No additional funds will be made available in grants to pay for such charges, so scientists face an additional financial burden just to get their work published.

A few thousand here and there may seem like a drop in an ocean where billions are spent on research every year. But at the level of individual groups this is a non-trivial amount of money. Here at MPIA we were informed of a budget shortfall this year, and asked to consider publishing in cheaper journals like MNRAS to keep costs down. Incidentally, as long as the expensive journal has a higher impact factor and is more visible in the US community, and search committees are told to care about such things, I will continue to submit to the expensive journals. Senior professors can take a stand and refuse to pay publication charges, but at the PhD and postdoc level we just can’t afford that luxury. And if you happen to work at Queen Mary in London you may be screwed on that front even if you have a permanent position.

I think it’s great that this debate has become so high profile, and that people at a high level are aware of the benefits of public access to research. But there’s some grumbling about the extra costs involved, and the sanity of introducing such measures unilaterally in one country. Some complain that freeing up UK research only will give a competitive advantage to the rest of the world.

In astronomy > 90% of all literature ends up on the Arxiv so in a sense we have dealt with our open access problem already. I had an interesting twitter exchange with Peter Coles, Mike Merrifield, Andy Lawrence and Matt Burleigh (his blog post on the subject here) after the news from the UK was announced, about ways to incorporate the stamp of approval lent by peer review into the Arxiv system (I see Peter has written about it too). I grumbled, and they came up with an idea.

[If only they'd been at .Astronomy! We could have had the whole service set up already for a trial.]

Papers submitted to Arxiv could be voluntarily submitted for peer review, which is provided by some kind of independent service where reviewers are paid a small amount of money for their effort. As the case is now, the referee can vote to reject the paper. If it’s accepted, the Arxiv submission could gain some sort of mark of endorsement on the webpage to inform readers of the quality of the research. In parallel, authors could still post their conference proceedings or other non-refereed writings to the Arxiv as they do now. As Peter writes, such a system requires some organisation and funding but there are no fundamental barriers (besides influence from the journals of course) to the implementation.

Who will take the lead?