Publishers should offer subscription discounts to universities that pay author fees, government agrees

Institutions that carry out publicly funded research and opt to publish their findings in journals that use the “author pay model” of open access should get a discount on their subscriptions to the same publisher’s journals, the UK government has said. The statement was made in response to a report by the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, published in September, in which MPs said that the government acted too quickly in favouring a “gold” model of open access that risked curbing access and increasing costs to universities.1 The United Kingdom is moving towards a system of open access so that research will be made freely available at …