How To Provide Open Access?

Scholarly publishers want to keep hosting taxpayer-funded research that will soon be made public free of charge. The publishers unveiled a plan to do so Tuesday by arguing they could save the federal government money. The plan also allows publishers to keep at least a piece of a pie they now own.

Research universities are also planning to unveil their own system in coming weeks that would have them, not publishers, as the main hosts of open-access research funded by about 15 federal agencies.

Open-access advocates were skeptical of the publishers’ proposal, which comes as the Obama administration works on the details of its open-access policy. The advocates cited years of industry opposition to open-access efforts.

The open-access movement in America won a major victory in February when the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy told federal agencies to work on plans to release federally funded studies to the public. The policy applies to future unclassified research by agencies with research budgets of $100 million or more.