LONDON—Britain should insist that government-funded researchers deposit a copy of their scientific papers in an electronic archive that can be accessed for free online, an influential committee of politicians said Tuesday (July 20).
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has been investigating science publishing most of this year. Its deliberations drew on an ongoing debate over "open access" to research, whose advocates say that the output from scientific research should be available free of charge.
"We have recommended that the UK government fund the establishment of an interlinked network of institutional repositories on which all research articles originating in the UK should be deposited and can be read for free," the committee's report, released today, states. "In order to ensure that the repositories are well populated, we have recommended that research councils mandate their funded researchers to deposit copies of all their articles in this way."
The committee ...
