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UK Day One says UKRI should end support for open-access block grants
Reforms to a “broken” UK academic publishing system could save £30 million for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, according to a think tank.
Reform Academic Publishing to Unblock Innovation, written by UK Day One’s Sanjush Dalmia and Jonny Coates, says that proposed reforms could immediately reduce costs to Dsit.
The report recommends UK Research and Innovation stop supporting open-access block grants to universities, arguing they cost £40 million every year and are used to pay article-processing charges to academic publishers.
Open-access block grants are currently used by UKRI to provide funding to support its own open-access policy.
Instead, £10m should go to direct support for “not-for-profit preprint servers” as well as “post-publication peer review platforms”, says the report.
The rest—£30m—can go to Dsit, allowing the department to “realise cost-savings”, it suggests.
Dalmia, a former science policy adviser to the Labour Party, said that “government intervention in this system currently wastes taxpayers’ hard-earned money by rewarding failure rather than generating pressure for reform”.
Plan U
The paper also recommends the implementation of the Plan U open-access initiative, which would mandate all taxpayer-funded research to be published as preprints before their submission to academic journals.
“UKRI’s ‘open-access policy’ should be modified to accept the publication of preprints as compliance,” it says.
A preprint-centric policy was imposed in the US in March by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major research funder, and ended support for payments of “article processing charges” for open-access journal publication.
"Following in the footsteps of Japan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, UKRI should adopt Plan U to accelerate scientific progress and reduce the market power of for-profit publishers,” Dalmia said.
The report also argues ministers should work with UK higher education technology body Jisc to lead a “collective bargaining” campaign with academic publishers across the board to reduce subscription costs and apply further pressure for reform in the field.