Thousands of British academics in every subject from art history to zoology will soon be required to make their research freely available online, the UK research councils have announced.
The move flies in the face of government reluctance to offend the publishing industry and is a victory for proponents of open access to research findings. By making free access a condition of grants, the research councils, which control billions of pounds worth of funding, hope to give British research more impact worldwide as it is taken up and cited by other researchers.
University libraries will benefit from an easing of the financial pressure to acquire more, and ever more expensive, journals as scholars can consult research for free.
The UK is now said to lead the world in open access policy, but today the Publishers' Association raised the alarm, accusing the research councils of going "too far, too fast" without properly costing their proposals.
International publishers, who lobbied hard against attempts by MPs to push open access pilots, are watching the research councils' moves closely. A report by the House of Commons science and technology committee urging open access was rejected by the government following representations by publishers who feared the loss of lucrative academic journals business.
Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the eight research councils, are proposing that researchers must archive their papers arising from the work they fund in openly available repositories, either at their own universities or belonging to subject bodies. Deposit should take place at the "earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication". The rule would come into effect in October, but researchers who were awarded grants before that date would be encouraged to do so too.
If researchers publish in "author-pays" journals, the research councils will pay for that. The research councils award between 4,500 and 5,000 grants a year.
Ian Diamond, chairman of RCUK, said their ideas were still emerging and a final decision had not yet been made, but the position statement sends a powerful signal to the sector.
Today, some academics said they feared the research councils had left a loophole by saying that the condition would be dropped if there was no repository available. To date there are 55 open access repositories in the UK (including 34 universities and departments) . The majority of institutions have yet to set one up.
But Stevan Harnad, of Southampton University, a leading advocate of open access, said he was confident the loophole would be plugged. "Not only does the UK have the second largest absolute number of open access archives [after the US], as well as one of the world's largest relative number, but once it has the RCUK policy too, it will also have the world's 'fullest' open access archives," he said.
Prof Diamond said: "The research councils are responsible for supporting and promoting the activities of a research base that is vibrant, productive and sustainable. We're, therefore, committed to ensuring the widest possible dissemination of ideas and knowledge, effective quality assurance of research and its results, cost effective use of public funds and the long-term preservation of research outputs. Our emerging position on the access issue should come as no surprise to those who understand our remit."
Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at the Publishers' Association, said repositories could never be a channel for formal publishing because they did not have the peer review or editorial input of journals. All journals were experimenting with new forms of publication and it would be a mistake for the research councils to try to impose one particular solution. "Things are being forced too far, too fast without a full understanding of what is involved here," he said.
Mr Taylor added that the costs of repositories were being seriously underestimated and they could prove unsustainable in practice.
Research Councils UK (www.rcuk.ac.uk),