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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: As I was saying, there is no problem with acknowledging that prestige journals are very important. They will continue. The Committee had no intention of suppressing the publication of data in the form of pamphlets, books or whatever. That point is extremely important. At the same time, it thought that information should be openly available to many more people. Many librarians told us, and it was the personal experience of some of us, that subscriptions in libraries were decreasing. I know why and what we should be doing about it. More funding is needed, not just through the local university, which has more commitments now, but from central sources. Every year, everyone who worked at a university was given a list of all the publications with the number of people who had accessed them over the last year; they had to pick their favourite. ““The Marine Biology of New Zealand”” might then disappear from the shelves, which I can understand, but sometimes subscriptions to very prestigious journals were stopped because of the increasing costs. The only way to handle that is to increase the budget into universities alongside the open access facility to recognise that this dual approach, with open access, is here to stay. More and more people are beginning to get involved in that across the world. It has been gaining momentum and influence. The political message, which is reflected by the Wellcome Trust, is that publicly funded research out of the taxpayers' pocket should be available for the public to see—whether it is complicated chemistry, physics or whatever. Yes, it may be a problem, but many of the other works that are published are there and open for the public who pay for them to see and understand. One cannot talk about openness and transparency without having that facility. Lots of public money feeds into the scientific publishing process. If we want this literate public, we have to give that facility a real chance to shine and develop. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough that universities should be mandated to self-archive their research papers. I welcome the fact that so many people are doing that now. Institutionally based repositories are being set up. We have to get away from the individual silo mentality. We have regional development agencies. Why do they not set up some kind of network between centres such as Cambridge, Essex, Ipswich and Norwich and so on, so that the costs can be kept down? Why is there no interaction and co-operation at that level? There is a real opportunity to think out of the box and think of new ways around the competitive environment that has been set up in our higher education system. If we want the knowledge to be generally shared with the world, the universe or whatever, it ought to be available through some kind of site. The Government have a responsibility—the report made that clear—to fund the creation of networker repositories to allow people to access all the UK-based repositories from a single site and to provide that shop-front for UK-based research, which is becoming so important. The amount being put into research means that more research, of all types, will do done in this country, and that research must be openly available. If we do not have a system that allows that, we will get what we had in the past. I remember from my time teaching PhD students that they would never publish their work because they could not be bothered. We must get out of that mentality of students and others at university who think, ““What for?”” The research assessment exercise, if it has done nothing else—and many of us do not favour it—has sharpened people up to publish things; we must give them the facility to do that, and make them proud of their work, so that more people can get in touch with it. The ““author pays”” publishing model is not one that we say is absolutely correct, and that everybody should operate it. All that we ask for that is people investigate it, for goodness' sake. That is all we wanted: it is an opportunity. There has been a vicious campaign suggesting that poor people doing research are going to have to find the money for publication from their own back pockets. We never said that, but we said that it should be part of the research councils' budgets to universities to allow that to happen. If we agree the principle that all publicly funded research should be published in journals and that all access to it should be open, the money for that should be provided. That is a sticking point for Government Departments: they would have to increase the science budget still further. And why not? We have doubled it in the last four years. I remember the debate when we asked for it to be doubled, and the mistake was that we should have asked for it to be quadrupled. More and more, science is playing major part, and the science journals are playing a part. The ““author pays”” model has its problems, one of which are the free-riders. Pharmaceutical companies publish a lot of stuff, on which people cannot get their hands—many of us fight that on other avenues—but if universities do that, it takes the onus off them from paying for the research. They can use the data in their facility. I do not have a blueprint solution for that, but I know that people need to talk honestly to universities about the matter because they need that science base. How they make a contribution to it is worthy of negotiation. I do not think that it is the job of a Select Committee to go into that kind of detail, but the businesses in existence—and not just those who have carried out the research and have trained—would receive the advantages gained by the research being reported. We have considered all the problems, because our report realised that we needed to address them. We were saying, ““Come on, get together, and start to address those problems, and do something about them.”” There has been a move in the right direction, but not enough of one. I mentioned the rigour of peer review, which certainly needs examination, and we should explore ways of how that is handled in this country. It has been said that the Government's response was negative—there is nothing new there, as it is their job not to respond immediately. However, whatever a Select Committee does, nobody will ever get any credit for it, believe you me. It was their idea first; I have seen it so often. Hon. Members should wait until the human embryology report comes out and the Department of Health comes up with ideas. I bet that we shall be able to take them across to the Select Committee report and say, ““That's interesting and I've seen that written up before.”” That is how it works. There is no harm in that, but as long as the process moves forward, we should all be happy with it. The attitude that there is no problem was not reflected in our report: there is a problem. There are problems that need seriously to be addressed. When we talked to the librarians' annual conference, they were absolutely over the moon about seeing something done about repositories. If the report does nothing else, it will have awoken people to tackling the question seriously. People have talked about the issues before—there is nothing new there—but I think that the report has helped to focus on those sort of questions. My final word to the Government is, ““Come on, get off your knees. If you believe in science, support some of the ideas in this report.””