N – Free access to UK research?

The UK Government has published a report that calls for all publicly funded research to be made freely available. The report says: “Government will work with partners, including the publishing industry, to achieve free access to publicly-funded research as soon as possible and will set an example itself,” Research councils will be required to ensure compliance with existing mandates to “deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication” and will investing £2 million (€2.4 million) to develop a ‘Gateway to Research’ website that could also include non-publicly funded research.