The chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry today welcomed the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s report on the implementation of open access.

Dr Robert Parker said: “We are very pleased to see the recommendations made in the Committee’s report. The outcomes of the inquiry respond directly to the serious concerns raised by both the research community and scientific publishers.

“In particular the previous lack of clarity over embargo periods for green open access has been of great concern to the RSC.

“We welcome the Committee’s confirmation that different embargo periods will be required for different disciplines, and that RCUK have now confirmed their endorsement of the decision tree prepared by the Publishers Association last year (and reproduced in the Committee’s report). We encourage RCUK to provide clarity to the research community by updating their open access policy accordingly.

“We are also pleased to see that amongst the Committee’s recommendations RCUK are being asked to assess the suitability of the Creative Commons Attribution licence for different disciplines. The RSC supports this review, and we are open to engaging with RCUK to identify the most appropriate licence for the chemical science community.

“The RSC supports open access and all RSC journals enable authors to publish their work in this way.

“As the custodian of internationally leading scientific publications, we echo Lord Krebs’ call to ensure that developments “do not inadvertently damage the ‘complex ecosystem’ of research communication in the UK”.

“Sustainable open access can enhance accessibility to research findings and this is in line with the RSC’s objective to disseminate scientific knowledge to advance the chemical sciences.”

Taylor & Francis is delighted to be joining the community of open access (OA) publishers that are part of OASPA. OASPA represents the interest of OA publishers globally within scientific and technical disciplines; advancing OA models, advocacy, education, and innovation within the field. “We fully support the objectives of OASPA in developing tools and standards to support OA publishing, and facilitating information exchange within the community”, remarked Vicky Gardner, Open Access Publisher.

Taylor & Francis offers a range of exciting Open Access options to provide authors flexibility and variety when they choose to publish research with us:Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open is a suite of high-quality and rigorously reviewed pure open access journals, helmed by internationally-acclaimed editors to ensure their calibre.

Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select offer authors or funders the option to make an article fully and permanently open access online in one of our subscription-based journals upon payment of an article publishing charge (APC).

Authors publishing in either programme will benefit from rapid online publication, rigorous peer review and the high levels of customer care Taylor & Francis provides to all authors.

”We are enormously pleased to be part of OASPA and see it as a way to forge sustainable OA publishing routes that will be of benefit to the global research communities across the whole gamut of subject areas”, said David Green, Global Publishing Director of Taylor & Francis Journals.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) today applauded President Obama for issuing a landmark Directive to ensure that the results of taxpayer-funded research – both articles and data – are made available to the general public to freely access and fully use.

The action today comes about after a ten-year campaign by the “Open Access” movement – scientists, universities, libraries, technology leaders, patient advocates, entrepreneurs, students, and every-day Americans – aimed at making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible and fully reusable in a digital environment.

“This is a watershed moment.  The Administration’s action marks a major step forward towards open access to scientific research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, which works to broaden public access to scholarly research.  “The Directive will accelerate scientific discovery, improve education, and empower entrepreneurs to translate research into commercial ventures and jobs.  It’s good for our nation, our economy, and our future.”

“Knowledge is power.  It’s the power to innovate, to advance scientific discovery, to promote economic growth, and to create jobs.  In 2013, we should be taking full advantage of the digital environment to disseminate the results of publicly funded research, not keep this knowledge locked away.”

Every year, the federal government uses taxpayer dollars to fund tens of billions of dollars of scientific research that results in thousands upon thousands of articles published in scientific journals.  The government funds this research with the understanding that it will advance science, spur the economy, accelerate innovation, and improve the lives of our citizens.  Yet most taxpayers – including academics, students, and patients – are shut out of accessing and using the results of the research that their tax dollars fund, because it is only available through expensive and often hard-to-access scientific journals.

The potential economic benefits of opening up access to this research are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  In instances where this kind of open access has already been enabled, remarkable examples demonstrate how powerful open access can be.  Placing the Human Genome Project in the public domain, for example, enabled scientists everywhere to access the data.  The $3.8 billion investment in the project has had an estimated economic impact of almost $800 billion.

Details of the White House Directive

The White House Directive, affirms the principle that the public has a right to access the results of taxpayer-funded research and calls on all federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to provide free and timely online access to the results of that research.  Articles reporting on the results of publicly funded scientific research must be made available after a 12 month embargo period.

The Directive builds on the progress made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first federal agency to require public access to taxpayer-funded research.  Since its implementation, the NIH policy enabled more than 90,000 new biomedical manuscripts to be made publicly available each year, resulting in millions of Americans having access to vital health care information.  Demand for this information is extremely high, with more than 700,000 unique users accessing material from this repository each weekday.

The Directive comes as the bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), is making is way through the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

“The Directive is a major achievement for both open access and open government.  We should now take the next step and make open access the law of the land. We commend Senators Cornyn and Wyden and Representatives Doyle, Lofgren, and Yoder for introducing FASTR and call on Congress to pass it without delay,” said Joseph.

To follow the conversation on Twitter use the hashtags #openaccess or #OA.  Media questions can be directed to @SPARC_NA or sparcmedia@arl.org.