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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: It would if that approach were universal, but if some journals charged a submission charge and others did not where would an author prefer to publish? The answer is pretty obvious. Online access to journals would be very welcome to people taking career breaks, such as women who were taking time off to have a child, for example. They could keep up with the literature if they were lucky enough to have a computer at home, or, even if they did not, in the library. That would be an advantage. The Government's response was wrong. I must reiterate that, because I, too, feel strongly about it. We were not recommending the author pays model in our conclusions. All that we were doing was to suggest to the Government that they should pay attention to it, and perhaps undertake some research and give guidance to publicly funded researchers, so that some indication of the future would be available. I am pleased to see from today's very welcome Wellcome Trust press release, which was embargoed until today, that the Committee's work has had an impact. The trust will pay for its authors—who are undertaking its research—to publish on three online services: Blackwell Online Open, Oxford University Press's Oxford Open and Springer Open Choice Services. The trust claims that that would cost 1 per cent. of its total annual spend, which seems quite a small amount. Today's announcement has given the open access movement a huge boost and drives the debate a step forward. The research councils' policy on institutional repositories has been mentioned, and it is one that I welcome, although it has not been finalised. The Committee Chairman and I met Professor Ian Diamond a few days ago, and it is hoped that the details of the policy will be finalised towards the end of spring. RCUK is about to reach agreements with a large number of commercial publishing houses, which will allow papers published in their commercial journals to go online on institutional repositories. However, there are difficulties, one of which is the delay. We have not worked out what the delay will be yet, but it will be at least six months, and 12 months for some journals. Of course, commercial publishing houses will allow only the text to be published, which for scientists—such as chemists like me who want to see spectroscopic data—will, frankly, be a severe hindrance. I ask commercial publishing houses to reconsider that policy and allow whole papers, not just the text, to be published online. It is not only the Wellcome Trust and RCUK that are involved. The open access movement is worldwide, and one of its big supporters is the National Institute of Health in the United States. All three organisations have considerable clout in publishing. When the details of RCUK's policy are announced, it will undoubtedly incentivise academics to deposit research papers in institutional repositories for the benefit of all worldwide. It will also incentivise those universities that have not already done so to set up such repositories. I know that the university of Liverpool has set one up, because I am a visiting professor there. Institutional repositories will be of benefit only if academics support them and if their funders insist on self-archiving in addition to publication in a reputable journal. In my opinion, they will never replace open access to the journals, particularly the high-impact journals in which everyone wants to be published. However, much research is conducted and published outside the academic environment. As my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North said, the Committee recommended that the British Library be made responsible for operating a central repository. A third requirement is needed to make institutional repositories successful. All publishers must allow their authors to self-archive in their repositories—without constraint, as I said earlier. Eventually, of course, the repositories will have to be international in scale. That will bring the problem of searching institutional repositories worldwide. Someone has to bite the bullet and provide the search engines. Perhaps it could be Google; perhaps it will be another similar commercial house. At this stage, we do not know. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North, not all work is published. I know that scores of works still lie unpublished on university library shelves. Indeed, I have one such thesis on my bookshelf; I published a letter, but the full details of the experiments have never been published, and I could not even persuade my research student, who went into industry, to find the time to published his excellent work. There are scores of unpublished theses throughout the world. I urge universities to deposit them in full in the institutional repositories. That would be a great advantage to science. Theses are littered with negative results, but no journal will publish them. If they are deposited, the negative results arising from hundreds of thousands of experiments will become available. That will help other scientists to avoid repeating those experiments—although when experiments are repeated, they often have different results. I shall briefly mention VAT. The Committee recommended that the Government consider not charging VAT on e-publications. I challenge the Minister. The Government want a level playing field. They said so to the Committee time after time. How can we have a level playing field if hard-copy publications are zero-rated for VAT and e-publications are rated at 17.5 per cent? The Government say that it is impossible not to charge VAT. Nothing is impossible. Publishing scientific papers is not only a European problem; it is a worldwide problem. However, VAT is special to Europe. We could raise the issue with the right director general, and try to persuade the European Parliament to zero rate e-publications. Only then will we have a truly level playing field. If that cannot be done, it could be possible to reduce VAT on e-publications to 5 per cent. The advent of e-publications has brought the world's publishing industry to a watershed. It is likely that more than one publishing model will be available for several years to come before market forces and our academic interests determine the preferred model. Some call for Government intervention and guidance. Indeed, the New Zealand Government have already determined their policy to support the open access movement. Governments already support the movement. Others, however, are content to allow the market to determine the future; that is where the Government appear to lie. One thing is for sure, the publishing business is in a state of turmoil. During the transitional period, the cost of accessing scientific publications is likely to rise even more, which will cause many difficulties, particularly for academia and public libraries. I look forward to the Minister's response.