Open Access News

Open access to research is inevitable, says Nature editor-in-chief

Created on Thursday, 14 June 2012 11:33

In the Guardian, Philip Campbell says the experience of open access to scientific research is 'very compelling' for readers and scientists.

Open access to scientific research articles will "happen in the long run", according to the editor-in-chief of Nature, one of the world's premier scientific journals.

Philip Campbell said that the experience for readers and researchers of having research freely available is "very compelling". But other academic publishers said that any large-scale transition to making research freely available had to take into account the value and investments they added to the scientific process.

"My personal belief is that that's what's going to happen in the long run," said Campbell. However, he added that the case for open access was stronger for some disciplines, such as climate research, than others.

Campbell, who was speaking on Friday [June 8] at a briefing by academic publishers on open access at the Science Media Centre, related his recent experience of reading papers on psychology and psychiatric treatments. "It's been a delight to find how many of those papers are published open access. I've been able to dip around into papers, get what I want, not necessarily the whole paper, and immediately find what I need. As a reader experience and a researcher experience, that's very compelling."

He added: "In the future, there will be text mining and tools … that need to get into that literature - I see that as a key part of the future and it's hard to see how that could work without open access."