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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

It is a pleasure to be speaking under your chairmanship, Mrs. Dean; I hope that you will keep me in order if I move off the subject. It was a delight to chair the inquiry, among hundreds of others, and I congratulate the members of the Committee on all the hard work that they put into it. I also congratulate the people who helped, including the Clerks. I want to mention one in particular; a young woman called Emily Commander, who was brilliant in terms of her penetration of the field. The Committee not only went to meetings of librarians, but into the depths of the City of London to meet venture capitalists who were rather worried about the possible implications for the publishing industry. That demonstrates the importance of this subject, which to most people is dull, boring and irrelevant. It is certainly not the kind of thing that one would find football fans talking about in terms of three-five-two systems or whether Alex Ferguson has gone a bit wonky at the top; like some politicians, I might add. I also congratulate the new chairman of the Committee; I hope that he can now spend some time worrying about the leadership in his party, as we all do, of course. Emily Commander was brilliant in guiding us, in helping us, and in getting the right people together to ask the questions. One could tell by the number of people in the gallery in all our sessions how much interest there was. I shall briefly say why the subject was so interesting. However, I shall say first that the Committee was not going to be domineering about the matter. It was a new area for us in which we reflected on the problems and how we might address them. Some members of the Committee who had experience of the publishing of academic journals knew how the problems had grown over the years and how, as in most things scientific and technological, the science and technology had moved on faster than regulation and faster than the communication of some of the discoveries that had been made. We considered the explosion of research and the absolute necessity to keep up our citation indexes in the international academic research community, which we do very well. We realised the importance of this issue, dull as it may be to most people. Getting three or four years' work published and out there for people to read and understand is a magnificent thing. Sometimes that can be a lifetime's work, and enabling people to see and understand it is all part of building our great scientific international community. The work must be accessible to people; not just scholars and academics, but the public. We know that the public may not want to read chemistry journals—neither do I, in some ways—but sometimes interesting articles are published in publications such as The Lancet, for example on subjects such as MMR, and people want to see for themselves what is being said, rather than what the Daily Mail tells them has been said. It is important that such material be openly accessible to people. It is also interesting to read how the work was done, what was found out, what we do not know, and what we need to know.