‘End UKRI funds for open access publishing,’ urges report

Scientists supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grants should be required to release their research as a preprint rather than receiving additional money to publish it open access, according to a report. 

Arguing for reforms that would deliver “significant savings” and “accelerate scientific progress”, a report published by the thinktank UK Day One calls on the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to mandate UKRI-funded research to be published as preprints prior to submission to academic journals, and end direct support for open access journal publication, which is currently about £40 million a year.

It draws attention to the “Plan U” programme introduced in March by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has stopped providing funding towards article processing charges for open access publication.

The Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation has also adopted a similar Plan U policy and donated £4.5 million in 2022 to two leading preprints – bioRxiv and medRxiv – to support its work up to 2024.

Using just a quarter of the £40 million that UKRI gives to funded projects to pay for article processing charges, the UK’s main research funder could provide £10 million in direct support for non-profit preprint servers or post-publication peer review sites such as PubPeer, says the UK Day One report published on 5 September.

The proposal bears some resemblance to plans put forward by the Coalition S group of funders last year which said outputs should be shared immediately and openly at no cost to funders, a shift that many see happening via the greater use of preprints or so-called diamond journals.

Drawing attention to the high profit margins of academic publishers, the report’s authors, Sanjush Dalmia, from UK Day One, and Jonny Coates, from ASAPbio, a not-for-profit organisation focused on life sciences, argue that the shift towards preprints would also be beneficial because the academic publishing system is “broken” and “constraining innovation-led growth”.

By relying on unpaid peer reviewers, scrutiny of papers was often slow, with some papers caught up in the review and publication process for months, the report argues.

Publication bias towards research with statistically significant results means researchers are “incentivised to simply minimise failure risk, instead of pursuing maximum impact on society or their research field”, it adds.

“The pressure to produce statistically significant results drives researchers toward ‘incremental’ studies with a higher likelihood of success, rather than ‘disruptive’ research that challenges existing scientific paradigms but carries greater risk of statistically insignificant outcomes,” the report says.

Research quality would be better supported by initiatives like the UK Reproducibility Network and DSIT-UKRI Metascience Unit, alongside “post-publication peer review” on platforms such as PubPeer, it adds.

“Government intervention in this system currently wastes taxpayers’ hard-earned money by rewarding failure rather than generating pressure for reform,” said the report’s co-author Sanjush Dalmia, a former science policy adviser to Labour.

“Following in the footsteps of Japan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, UKRI should adopt Plan U to accelerate scientific progress and reduce the market power of for-profit publishers,” he added.

Noting how UK universities paid some £93 million to access research papers in 2014, the report also calls on science minister Sir Patrick Vallance to play a direct role in negotiating future settlements by overseeing the sector’s collective bargaining with publishers carried out by Jisc on behalf of universities.

“The mandatory publication of publicly funded research as preprints will strengthen Jisc’s negotiating power, since journal subscriptions will not be required to access this research in the future,” it says.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com