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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for accepting the point that the publishing of scientific research will always cost money. That is an essential part of this debate. As for his earlier intervention, I believe that the author pays model severely undermines the prospect of peer review. How can the advocates of change guarantee that we will not rapidly move to a model of ““who pays most gets published fastest””? If there is a free-for-all, how can we monitor the quality of contributions as we do now, both by peer review and by the quality of journals in which they are published? The new model will not simply reduce the costs of disseminating scientific research to the benefit of the research community; it will transfer those costs somewhere else within the scientific community.