Press releases
29 June 2006
BioMed Central welcomes UK research councils actions to promote open access
BioMed Central today welcomed the latest moves by the UK research councils to enhance access to publicly funded research in the UK.
The new policy statements from Research Councils UK (RCUK)1, and from the individual research councils2, contribute additional momentum to the movement towards making all publicly funded research freely accessible. In particular, three research councils (the MRC, BBSRC and ESRC) have announced that they will mandate open access archiving for all the research that they fund.
The statement from the Medical Research Council (MRC) is especially important for biomedical researchers, as the MRC is largest public funder of biomedical research in the UK. The MRC's new policy requires that, for all grants awarded after 1 October 2006, the full text of resulting research articles must be deposited in PubMed Central not more than 6 months after publication.
The MRC statement strongly encourages grantees "to publish in journals that allow them (or their institutions) to retain ownership of the copyright," and reconfirms the MRC's policy that funding for open access journal article-processing charges may be included in grant requests.
With its new policy on open access, the MRC follows in the footsteps of the Wellcome Trust, which introduced a policy requiring open access deposition of research articles in May last year. This means that from now on, all research funded by the two largest biomedical funders in the UK will be made openly available to the public and to researchers around the globe - a huge step forwards for the open access movement.
In addition to the MRC, the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) have announced similar policies, requiring open access deposition of articles by their grantees, from 1 October.
An important aspect of the RCUK's overall statement, is the recognition that: "[article processing charges for open access journals] could be part of an institution's indirect costs under the full economic costing regime." This is highly significant, since it clarifies to institutions that the cost of article processing is seen as a research infrastructure cost, and can be funded as such. This should be of great help in smoothing the transition from the traditional model in which research publishing is paid for through library subscriptions, towards an open access model, under which the cost of publication is paid for as part of the cost of doing research.
For UK-based authors, the new policies from the MRC and BBSRC, in particular, provide additional reasons to publish in BioMed Central's 160+ open access journals.
Not only do authors publishing in BioMed Central's journals retain the copyright, but the articles are automatically deposited with PubMed Central and made openly accessible immediately on publication, satisfying the research council requirements and reducing effort on the part of the author.
BioMed Central's publisher, Matthew Cockerill, commented:
"After months of discussion and debate, it is exciting to see the research councils taking such positive action to enhance access to the results of the research that they fund. The UK is now leading the world by demonstrating that open access to research is both a desirable and an achievable goal. BioMed Central looks forward to playing its part, by offering authors a range of high quality, fully open access journals in which to publish their work."
1 RCUK statement: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/2006statement.pdf
2 Statements from individual research councils: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/
SHERPA have released a useful advice service, JULIET, that summarises policies given by various research funders. JULIET is available at www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet
Further Information from BioMed Central
BioMed Central contact: Grace Baynes (press@biomedcentral.com or +44 20 7631 9988)
About BioMed Central
BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other subscription-based content.
