Wellcome Trust Joins 'Academic Spring' to Open up Science

Motivated by the conviction that scientific information should be open, Academic Spring is a global movement by academics, researchers, and scholars opposing the restrictive copyright and circulation of traditional academic journals and promoting free access online instead. According to this article, it was instigated when a blog post by mathematician Timothy Gowers went viral in January 2012; he called for free access for recent scientific research, including academic journal publishing reform. This Guardian article focuses on the implication of the support of United Kingdom (UK)'s Wellcome Trust, a non-governmental funder of medical research. This support, it is hoped, will galvanise the movement by forcing the academics it funds to publish in open online journals. The idea is that, by making information more readily available, the public can more easily engage in science and research.

As of September 2012, over 12,000 researchers have signed an online boycott of journals that restrict free sharing. These scientists are speaking out in the belief that open content enables effective information dissemination on the web so that knowledge can spread further, have more influence, and be used in more ways than the people who wrote it might have expected.

Quoted in the Guardian article is Sir Mark Walport, the director of Wellcome Trust, who believes that the results of public and charity-funded scientific research should be freely available to anyone who wants to read it, for whatever purpose they need it. To that end, his organisation is in the final stages of launching a scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with publications such as Nature and Science. Unlike traditional journals, articles in eLife will be free to view on the web as soon as they are published. He also said that the Wellcome Trust would soon adopt a more robust approach with the scientists it funds to ensure that results are freely available to the public within 6 months of first publication. Researchers who do not make their work open access in line with the Trust's policy could be sanctioned in future grant applications to the charity. Willetts has appointed Dame Janet Finch, a former vice-chancellor of Keele University, to sit down with academics and publishers to work out how an open-access scheme for publicly funded research might function in the UK.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which is one of the small number of large publishing companies who charge universities up to €20,000 (£16,500) per year each to subscription for academic access (in part, the academic journals say, these fees are in response to the need for a high-quality peer review process), notes that: "There has been a constructive collaboration as we've worked with the Wellcome Trust to build support and participation among authors....At the same time, we will also remain committed to the subscription model. We want to be able to offer our customers choice, and we see that, in addition to new models the subscription model remains very much in demand."

According to the article, the UK government has also signalled its support for open access, and Research Councils UK, the coordinating body for the distribution of more than £3bn of government money via the science research councils, has issued a consultation on open access. The main recommendation is in line with the Wellcome Trust's policy.