David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers’ Association yesterday, set out the Coalition’s commitment to free Open Access to publicly funded UK research outputs. He acknowledged the role of publishers in scholarly communication and said that he wanted to work with them. Not only is there a need for public access to publicly funded research, he said, but there is also a need to make it more discoverable and to assist “networking between researchers and SMEs”. To this end, he said, Research Councils in the UK “are now investing £2 million in the development of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’ portal. Jimmy Wales has been asked to advise on the creation of this portal, which it is intended “will enable users to establish who has received funding and for what research [and] provide direct links to actual research outputs such as data sets and publications”.
