Asked by: Fabian Hamilton (Labour - Leeds North East)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, if he will hold discussions with universities on the value for money of their contracts with academic publishers for (a) journal subscriptions and (b) open-access publishing.
Answered by Feryal Clark - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Jisc is an independent nonprofit company that supports universities with the transition to open access. It does this through negotiating a range of transitional open access agreements and institutional access to journal publications. These agreements enable UK research output to be published open access in accordance with UK funder policies.
Jisc will negotiate new agreements with publishers on behalf of the sector in 2025. This will focus on pace of change to open access models, the financial sustainability of agreements, and equity to enable a wider audience to benefit including researchers, small specialist institutions and public health organisations.
Asked by: Fabian Hamilton (Labour - Leeds North East)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether he is taking steps to support (a) affordable and (b) open-access models in academic publishing.
Answered by Feryal Clark - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Government supports open science because it drives innovation and collaboration by enabling researchers, innovators and policymakers to access and use the latest science and evidence. UKRI Open Access policy ensures that findings from research funded by the public through UKRI can be freely accessed. The policy supports around 45,000 research articles a year, being made OA immediately. In 2022 over 85% of all articles arising from UKRI funded research were open access.
UKRI Open Access Awards support over 150 universities, research institutes and PSREs in meeting the requirements of the UKRI open access policy. These awards cover article publishing charges (APCs) under certain value for money terms and supports open publishing agreements where there is no article fee. The grants also support improvements to digital research infrastructures, repository management and guidance for researchers.