BRITAIN: Scientific research funded by the European taxpayer should be freely available to everyone over the internet, according to a European Commission report - a blow to the lucrative scientific publishing operations of media groups such as Reed Elsevier and Germany's Springer.
The report, produced by economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels for the EC, shows that in the 20 years to 1995 the price of scientific journals rose 300 per cent more than the rate of inflation. In the 10 years since then, price increases slowed, but still significantly outpaced inflation.
"While it is important to stress the societal value of the existing publication system, it is also important to acknowledge the societal cost linked to high journal prices, in financial terms for public budgets, but also in terms of limits on the dissemination of knowledge and therefore of further scientific progress," the report concludes.
The report, published this month and open to consultation until the summer, recommends open access to publicly-funded research. It proposes that researchers who receive EU funding should be "mandated" to place copies of articles published in subscription journals on web-based archives that can be accessed by everyone for free.
The worry for traditional publishers such as Reed, Springer, Blackwell and the hundreds of learned societies that make their money through journals, is that if research is available for free on the internet no one will pay subscriptions.
Reed Elsevier yesterday welcomed the EC report as a further contribution to the debate over scientific publishing.
The EC report also recommends experimenting with new forms of "open access publishing", whereby researchers pay for their articles to be published free to all on the internet.
BioMed Central, for example, publishes 110 open access journals in the fields of biology and medicine.