Wellcome says OA will reduce publishing costs

The Wellcome Trust has launched an all-out attack on commercial STM publishing in a new report that claims that open access will wipe as much as 30% off the publishing costs of scientific articles.

The Trust, which distributes around £400m a year in funding research into human and animal health, said current commercial distribution strategies prevent the results of its research from being widely and freely disseminated.

Dr Mark Walport, director of the trust, said: "As a research funder we have to question whether it is right that we, and others, are in the position of having to pay to read the results of the research we fund."

The trust's report into the £22bn global STM publishing industry says a small number of publishers have complete control over the distribution of research that, in 90% of cases, has been publicly funded, and that this control allowed these publishers to make profits of up to 40%.

Wellcome says that a payment of £1,100 per article would create a viable, high quality and sustainable OA publishing model - compared to £1,500 under the traditional system. It calculates that research costs would rise by only 1% to accommodate open access.

Walport said the main aim of the report was to start a dialogue with learned societies to encourage them to embrace OA. "It's time for serious discussion, particularly with the learned societies which, as the report makes clear, should have nothing to fear from a new publishing model."

However, Ron Fraser, general secretary of the Society for Microbiology, said discussions among his board had yielded little enthusiasm for an OA alternative. He said: "Some societies are giving their authors the option as to whether they want to pay, but the uptake has not been good. When I spoke to the board about this, very few hands went up in favour."

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