A report commissioned by the European Union concludes that research funded by the European Taxpayer should be made freely available over the Internet. This would be a body blow for the likes of publisher Reed Elsevier who rely on revenue from scientific publishing.

The report, produced by Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels shows that in the twenty years to 1995, the rise in the price of journals outstripped inflation by 300 per cent. Price rises have moderated over the last ten years but they have still been greater than inflation.

It is proposed that researchers who receive EU funding should be obliged to place copies of articles published in subscription journals on web-based archives that can be accessed by everyone for free.

For Reed and the hundreds of learned societies that make their money through selling journals, the fear is that with content available for free, no one will be willing to pay subscriptions.

The issue has been heatedly debated in the UK and in 2004 the Science and Technology select Committee was set up to investigate and report on the matter.

At the time, Head of Clinical Programmes for Cancer Research UK, Dr Richard Sullivan urged pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to follow the example of GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly to register and publish all their trials. Other companies are reluctant to follow this lead as they feel they will be giving away commercially confidential information to competitors. Dr Sullivan said ‘If GSK and Eli Lilly can be open so can the whole industry.’

The fear surrounding not publishing these findings is that much abortive research will be repeated by a number of companies or individuals, making absolutely no progress towards finding what would be cures for life-threatening diseases. Cancer Research UK has the aim of, within three years, having all clinical trials registered and results published within a reasonable time. Professor of Oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Fran Balkwill said that the Internet could be used to disseminate data that medical journals were not interested in publishing.

The fear surrounding not publishing these findings is that much abortive research will be repeated by a number of companies or individuals

The ‘subscriber pays’ is the most prevalent publishing model, where authors submit articles to journals, often free-of-charge, although the author may be required to pay ‘page charges’ or supplements for colour reproduction. The publishers then send the articles out for peer review and those regarded as being of a sufficiently high standard are edited and published. The journal is then sold to readers, usually by means of a subscription. Commercial, learned and professional societies and academic publishers, all use this model, although some are already running trials with the ‘author pays’ model.

‘Author pays’ is an emerging publishing model in which the authors or more probably their research sponsors pay for their articles to be published in a journal. Again the publishers send the articles for peer review and then edit and publish those deemed good enough.

The journal is then disseminated free-of-charge, either on the Internet or printed in paper form. This is often referred to as ‘open access’ publishing.

The ‘open access’ movement supports the concept that the published output of scientific research should be available to everyone without charge. This movement embraces both author pays publishing models and self-archiving. In the case of self-archiving, authors publish articles in journals but also deposit a copy of each article in a personal, institutional or other repository, where it can be freely accessed via the Internet.