UK Going Open Access

The United Kingdom government hatches a plan to provide free public access to government-funded research.

Written byBob Grant

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Britain will be a land of open access, if the United Kingdom government's strategy to freely disseminate publicly funded research comes to fruition. The UK's Science Minister David Willets announced the plan in an opinion piece that ran in The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday (May 1). He formally laid out the plan at a meeting of the UK Publishers Association today (May 2).

"Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research," Willets wrote. "The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers."

The UK government is enlisting the help of a University of Manchester ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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