Assuming the plan does not get derailed in the intervening year+, the UK is set to make a complete reversal in how (publicly funded) academic research gets disseminated.

I last wrote about this brewing storm in April, when it looked like outrage at astronomical bills university libraries have to pay might finally cause some changes. Instead, it appears that the British have made a bold first move. The notion is simple:

[R]esearch papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

That may not seem like a lot, but it's a huge deal and if other countries follow suit it could be an even bigger effect. It's not cheap - the government is estimating that UKP 50 million/year will need to be paid out of existing budgets to fund this publication. Of course, that compares favorably to the current UKP 200 million+ that research libraries are paying, but it's not that easy to shuffle money from one pot - the library funding generally coming from things like University budgets and endowments - to the other. Money that scientists have to pay to publish their own work (including servers, bandwidth, staff, support, etc) is money that then isn't available to spend on lab costs, grad students, conference travel, and the other essential components of actually doing the research in the first place.

The final details of the model are not yet nailed down and will probably be fought over at length. Journals and their publishers will of course want to retain control and the free labor system that they now have. Academics will (dear gods, FINALLY) have to re-think how publication and tenure are so tightly bound. The Guardian article describes two competing models, dubbed "gold" and "green", for how research can be opened up. The gold model favors publishers, generally; the green model favors the free and open advocates. It also seems like the new online/open journals such as PLoS aren't being heard here, which is something of a shame.

But still, there's a lot of time to work out how it's going to work, and as Professor Adam Tickell, of Birmingham University is quoted, the UK only produces about 6% of the world's research publications. That means at very best we've still got 94% to go.