Echoing its earlier response to a parliamentary committee report that advocated state support for the open-access model of disseminating scientific findings, the British government said earlier this week (February 1) it had no intention of requiring researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories.

"The government should be supporting the best and most cost-effective way possible to channel scientific outputs, and at the moment it is not demonstrable that the 'author pays' model is the better system," the government said in a second response to criticisms of its earlier statements. "The action the government has decided on is to facilitate a level playing field, which will enable authors who wish to publish in author-pays journals to do so. This includes working with RCUK [Research Councils UK] on a common policy that allows scientists to publish in an author-pays journal where they want to do so."

"The government recognizes the potential benefits of institutional repositories and sees them as a significant development worthy of encouragement," the response said. "But it believes that each institution has to make its own decision about Institutional repositories depending on individual circumstances."

In July of last 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. The committee's report recommended that the UK government fund the establishment of a network of institutional repositories where all research articles originating in the United Kingdom would be deposited and available to read for free.

In November, the government responded to the report, saying it had no intention of requiring researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories. That response drew strong criticism from open-access advocates and from the committee itself, particularly over the government's focus on the "author-pays" model of journal publishing, rather than the idea of open-access repositories.

"The government has not decided against the author-pays model, but does not want to force a premature transition to a different system," the new report says. "To strongly endorse or reject the author-pays approach would not be in the interests of allowing the market itself to evolve to meet the needs of authors and the wider academic community."

Peter Suber, an advocate of open access who is based at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., told The Scientist the second government response suffered from the same shortcomings as the first one.

"It gave primary attention to OA journals, when this was only a secondary issue to the committee report, and it dismissed the primary recommendation of the report, on OA archives, without any attempt to answer the committee's arguments," Suber said. "It's all the more surprising because the committee criticized the government for these shortcomings in November, and the government had little reason to write a new response except to answer this criticism."

Despite recent reversals, the mood among open-access supporters is upbeat, Suber said. "Open access has worldwide momentum and makes new gains every day… Two especially large initiatives have had setbacks: the NIH [National Institutes of Health] public-access policy has been watered down, and the Gibson committee recommendations were rejected by the government. But even if these two initiatives ended there, they would not diminish all the other initiatives that are moving forward."

In the United Kingdom, attention is now focused on RCUK, which is currently drawing up a common policy on open access. "The government is willing to let the RCUK adopt a policy that the government itself will not adopt, and the RCUK seems likely to do so," Suber said.

A spokesman for RCUK told The Scientist that the policy decision was moving forward. "RCUK is in the process of getting endorsement of its position from all of the seven Research Councils and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and this is expected to take at least a number of weeks," he said.