FEATURE Open access???? Open I
n early July, the world’s largest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, revealed plans to launch a new open access publishing platform, Wellcome Open Research.
Designed so grant-holders can publish research outputs breathtakingly fast, the venture is based on F1000Research, an open access publishing platform developed by life sciences services publisher, F1000, UK. As F1000 founder and chairman, Vitek Tracz, asserts: ‘This is going to be huge and will completely and profoundly transform the whole way research is published.’ From articles and data-sets to null and negative results, the platform will publish content within days of submission following in-house editor checks, with post-publication peer review being arranged subsequently. Then, once past peer review, articles will be indexed in major bibliographic databases and deposited in PubMed Central and Europe PMC. For researchers, the promise of disseminating results almost immediately is finally becoming real, but for Tracz, this is just the beginning. ‘Our scheme is based on
4 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016
access: at what cost?
As scholarly publishing edges closer to open access, industry players are devising radical ways to cut costs. Rebecca Pool reports
the idea that funders and major institutions can take control of the publishing system away from today’s publishers,’ he says. ‘The first major funder has opened a platform here and we’re now talking to other funders, research institutions and more. ‘It is ridiculous that research can be delayed by months, sometimes up to a year,’ he adds. ‘But I believe more funding groups will operate these platforms, and these will eventually merge to form a single international platform for research to be published in a new way.’
Global domination or not, industry developments such as this indicate that open access is increasingly important to academics, with many in scholarly publishing certain that a complete switch to this form of publishing is nigh on inevitable. Government mandates, funding and institutional support are driving change, and as Louisa Dale, director of Jisc Sector Intelligence puts it: ‘There is clear evidence that academics have a greater appetite to share research within and beyond their disciplines.’ ‘The great deal of work that’s been
done through HEFCE and the research- funding councils in the UK is making a real difference,’ she adds.
Indeed, a recent survey of 6,679 academics – commissioned by Jisc and Research Libraries UK – indicates that 64 per cent would be very happy to see the subscription-based publication model replaced by an open access system, in which all research outputs would be publicly available. As Dale also points out, in line with this, 67 per cent of the survey respondents strongly wished their research
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