The British government has largely rejected the advice of a parliamentary committee that had urged it to support more open access to scientific research, saying on Monday (November 8) that it has no plans to require researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories.
In July this year, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology published a report on the status and future of scientific publishing in the United Kingdom. Its deliberations drew in part on an ongoing debate over "open access" to research, whose advocates say that the output from scientific endeavor should be freely available.
The committee's report made many recommendations, including that the UK government fund the establishment of a network of institutional repositories where all research articles originating in the United Kingdom should be deposited and could be read for free: "In order to ensure that the repositories are well populated, ...
