Research Councils UK: Open Access Policy (S&T Report)

Lord Broers Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on gaining this debate. I compliment him on his excellent opening speech, which so clearly explained the issues and the reasoning behind our recommendations. I also compliment Christopher Atkinson, our clerk, who once again provided highly professional support to the committee on this inquiry, which was mounted in a very short time. I join other members of the committee in supporting the recommendations of our report, especially that Research Councils UK should include reference to the five-year implementation phase in its requirements documents so that everyone is aware that it is not asking for a precipitous implementation of its rules. I also feel that the long-term aim of migrating entirely to gold access, as has been mentioned by other noble Lords, needs continually to be reviewed. I was particularly troubled by the fact that many of the most important US journals with which I am familiar, and in which I have published, such as Science and the journals of the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the IEEE, do not seem to have plans to offer gold access. It would significantly reduce the impact of some of our most important research if they were not available to our researchers in engineering and the physical sciences. I was, however, reassured by David Willetts’s statement that,

“we will be reviewing implementation in 2014 and that will give us flexibility on timing and everything else”.

I wish now, with your Lordships’ indulgence, to talk about something that is not directly a part of this report. It is the complex situation encountered when considering when and how to publish new science that contains ideas that have potential for commercial application. This was not something we considered, although the noble Lord, Lord Wade, and I asked questions of our witnesses about whether the move to open access would have any effect on patents and commercialisation. We were told that this was a separate matter. This was a correct answer in the context of this inquiry, but this matter is none the less of great importance to the UK economy. Over the past few decades there has been a steady shift of research, as opposed to development—unfortunately, we almost universally elide these two—from industry to universities, with a consequent increase in expectation about the potential commercialisation of ideas emerging from academic research. Much of our applied science and engineering research addresses science that is of interest because it has the potential of benefiting mankind through commercial development. Indeed, on examining the 36 units of assessment in the Research Excellence Framework, I identified at least 15 units in which patents might well be one of the outputs.

It is not always the case that early and wide access to research results is good for our economy. One of our witnesses, Professor Walmsley of Oxford University, referred to this issue, saying:

“Our policies internally at Oxford are to try to capture that IP in a manner that is consistent with UK law—i.e. getting the IP protected before one comes out and publishes”.

I am not aware, however, that this is widely practised and can find no advice on this issue in the description and guidance literature for the Research Excellence Framework. Patents are of course recognised output for the REF, and it is stated that all forms of research will be assessed on a fair and equal basis, but there is always a tension between the wish to publish new results and the need to wait until potentially valuable intellectual property has been protected. In fact, the incentives for academic researchers seem strongly biased towards publishing as early and as widely as possible. I am sure that any formal requirement to ensure that IP was protected before publication was approved would be controversial, as it would be regarded as a constraint on academic freedom. To counter this in industry, many leading technology companies, at least in my experience in the US, directly reward employees for their IP output to compensate them for the loss, for a time, of recognition in the wider world for their advances. I have no specific recommendations to make on this issue, but it is a topic that should be considered in depth by the funding councils, the research councils and by vice-chancellors, with the aim of improving our ability to secure the economic potential of our academic research before we share all our ideas with the entire world over the internet. There has never been a time when an increase in our ability to commercialise academic research would be of more benefit to the nation.