Opening Access to Research

Traditionally, the scholarly journal market operates so that research institutions are charged high prices and the wider public is often excluded altogether, while authors can usually publish for free and commercial publishers enjoy high profits. Two forms of open access regulation can mitigate these problems: (i) direct price regulation of the form whereby a journal must charge a price of zero to all readers, or (ii) mandating authors or publishers to make freely available an inferior substitute to the published paper. The former policy is likely to result in authors paying to publish, which may lead to a reduction in the quantity of published papers and may make authors less willing to publish in selective journals. Recent UK policy towards open access is discussed.