Government Actions

The issue of access to scholarly publishing has secured the government's attention in the U.S., the U.K., and the European Union. There has been increased government scrutiny of the conventional scholarly publishing system, with particular attention being paid to the fact that the results of publicly funded research are usually accessible only through high-cost scientific, technical, and medical journals.

In 2004, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee recommended that articles stemming from National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. In 2005, the NIH released its "Implementation of Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research," which "requests and strongly encourages all NIH-funded investigators to make their peer-reviewed author's final manuscripts available to other researchers and the public at the NIH National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC). . . immediately after the final date of journal publication." See the NIH and Open Access Web page for more detailed information on this policy.

In 2004, the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded a significant inquiry into scientific publishing. The final report (Scientific Publications: Free for All?) recommended that articles resulting from government-funded research be deposited in institutional repositories, which would be established at all U.K. higher education institutions, and that funds be made available to pay open access journal publication fees for such articles. Although the U.K. Government did not support these recommendations, the Research Councils U.K., which distributes government research funds, issued a position statement that instructed the eight constituent Research Councils to "publish guidelines for their communities on access to research outputs in each field."

Several Councils have acted according to the Guardian:

The Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, have all opted to make online archiving a requirement of grants from this October. The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils said merely that researchers "should" archive. The remaining four councils have yet to rule on the issue.

From 2004-2005, The European Union conducted a major study of the scientific publication markets in Europe, which recommended that EU funding agencies "promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories" and that the EU:

(i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and (ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented.