Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with reference to the report by UK Day One entitled Reform Academic Publishing to Unblock Innovation, published on 5 September 2024, if he will make an assessment of (a) the potential merits of requiring the publication of all taxpayer-funded research as preprints before they are submitted to academic journals and (b) the value for money of UKRI’s policy on open access block grants.

The UKRI open access policy aims to make the results of publicly funded research immediately available so they can be accessed and built upon. UKRI encourages preprints across research disciplines and reserves the right to require preprints where necessary.

UKRI Open Access Block Grant Awards support institutions in meeting its policy requirements. Awards cover article publishing charges (APCs) only under certain value for money terms as well as the sharing of papers via repositories and improvements to digital research infrastructures. UKRI monitors progress on open access, as well as how best to increase the accessibility of the research it funds.