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Yes, I have also been waiting for somebody to comment on this important development. I sent my comment to SPARC oa-forum, where it takes longer to appear, but I have reproduced it below. Comments welcome. Fred Friend From: CHARLES OPPENHEIM Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 4:22 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Government White Paper on OA I;ve been expecting someone to post something on this, but no-one has, so I will! Today's Government White Paper commits the Government to requiring that all outputs from research funded by public sector are made available by OA. See http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategy-for-growth.pdf Charles Professor Charles Oppenheim “Four weeks ago I posted a message to this list expressing concern that the prospects for a substantial growth in OA content have been damaged by the renewal of many “big deals”, keeping money in the toll-access market which could have been used to increase funds available to authors to pay OA publication charges for publication in OA journals. That concern remains, but UK hopes for a big increase in OA have been raised by a UK Government policy statement issued yesterday and available at http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/innovation/innovating-for-growth . The policy statement is about “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth”, which is exactly where a commitment to OA belongs. The statement makes several important commitments: Para 6.6: “The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.” Para 6.7: “There are many successful international examples of open access research. At Harvard, academics often grant the university a non-exclusive irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly output for non-commercial use. Their articles are then stored, preserved and made freely available through the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH).” Para 6.8: “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.” Para 6.9: “The Research Councils expect the researchers they fund to deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication. But this practice is unevenly enforced. Therefore, as an immediate step, we have asked the Research Councils to ensure the researchers they fund fulfil the current requirements. Additionally, the Research Councils have now agreed to invest £2 million in the development, by 2013, of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’. In the first instance this will allow ready access to Research Council funded research information and related data but it will be designed so that it can also include research funded by others in due course.” For those of us who witnessed the negative reaction of the previous UK Government to the 2004 Parliamentary Enquiry, these words are wonderful to read, and a tribute to the work carried out since 2004 to bring home to Government the potential benefits of OA to research and education communities and to the taxpayer. The concern about the funding of OA publication charges remains, but UK authors and research institutions now have full Government support for making the results of publicly-funded research available in repositories. Fred Friend Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL”