The British government has largely rejected the advice of a parliamentary committee that had urged it to support more open access to scientific research, saying on Monday (November 8) that it has no plans to require researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories.

In July this year, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology published a report on the status and future of scientific publishing in the United Kingdom. Its deliberations drew in part on an ongoing debate over "open access" to research, whose advocates say that the output from scientific endeavor should be freely available.

The committee's report made many recommendations, including that the UK government fund the establishment of a network of institutional repositories where all research articles originating in the United Kingdom should be deposited and could be read for free: "In order to ensure that the repositories are well populated, we have recommended that research councils mandate their funded researchers to deposit copies of all their articles in this way."

But the government's response makes clear that while it sees the value of such repositories, it "has no present intention to mandate Research Council–funded researchers to deposit a copy of their published material in institutional repositories."

The committee members immediately labeled the government's response as obstructive and questioned whether the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which compiled the document, had watered down the views of other government departments and bodies.

"The Department of Trade and Industry has clearly tried to 'neutralize' the views put forward by other departments and Government-funded organizations, in particular the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), an expert advisory body funded indirectly by the Department for Education and Skills," the committee members said in a press statement.

A spokesman for the DTI told The Scientist that the department was surprised by the statements from the Select Committee. "We submitted a response to their report in the normal way and consulted all the relevant people in government," he said. "JISC and other bodies saw a final draft of the response and as far as we were aware were content with it."

The members of the committee are also unhappy that the government's response focused on criticism of the "author-pays" publishing model, "despite the fact that the committee's report did not recommend its wholesale adoption." Moreover, they say, the government has prejudged the publishing model, instead of encouraging experimentation.

Ian Gibson, chair of the committee, said in a statement: "DTI is apparently more interested in kowtowing to the powerful publishing lobby than it is in looking after the best interests of British science. This isn't evidence-based policy, it's policy-based evidence.

For Stevan Harnad, a long-time advocate of open access, the government's response is "not so much disappointing as delaying." Harnad agreed with the committee's assessment, saying that "the government has declined to implement the select committee's recommendations because they have been persuaded by DTI (who were persuaded by the publisher lobby) that the report recommends mandating OA (author-pays) publishing, whereas it does no such thing: it recommends mandating institutional self-archiving of UK-funded research publications (articles)."

"This misconstrual… is a result of the excess verbiage continuously devoted to publishing reform, instead of the access provision that this is all really about," Harnad told The Scientist.

On the other hand, the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, welcomed the government's report. "As one of many learned societies which rely on the income from its journals to fund core activities for science in the UK, the Royal Society supports the Government's intention to avoid any action that might threaten the viability of such societies," a spokesman said.

The Royal Society commended the government's caution with respect to institutional repositories, too. "In particular, the emphasis put on the importance of academic journals in providing quality assurance through peer-review and the decision not to mandate researchers who are funded by Research Councils to deposit their papers in institutional repositories."

Meanwhile, Harnad said that he has every hope that Research Councils UK (RCUK) will still implement the original UK select committee recommendation "in all its glory." He noted that something similar is happening in the United States, where the National Institutes of Health is moving ahead toward implementation of a related proposal, without waiting for the US Congress and Senate to agree on a law.

A spokesman for RCUK confirmed that the government's response did not prevent the research councils from implementing the recommendations if they so chose. But a decision on the matter may be some time off, he told The Scientist, as RCUK is in the process of formulating its position on open access and probably won't be finished doing so until some time in early 2005.