UKRI’s new open access policy will hinder open science

The author clearly has a conflict of interest in voicing these remarks. And what do researchers want? OA with no APCs, purely commercial interests out of publishing, and more support to the non-commercial publishing sector too.

What exactly is Springer Nature's progress in transforming journals? According to the files available on their website https://www.springernature.com/gp/librarians/licensing/journals-catalog, the share of fully open access journals decreases constantly: 20.1% in 2019, 19.4% in 2022. (in 2017 it was 21.1%) It is the publisher's behaviour that drives funders to more and more restrictive policies.

Response from UKRI: The global scholarly publishing system works with different business models. In pursuing full and immediate open access we do not want to restrict our authors to publishers who follow a particular business model. We welcome the widespread dissemination of preprints which has been so valuable in recent times and recognise the subsequent fully peer-reviewed article, accepted by publishers as an addition to the scholarly literature, as a valid and satisfactory description of research funded by UKRI. UKRI is committed to open research and the new UKRI open access policy for research publications is one key element of our open research strategy which also includes data and other research activities and outputs David Sweeney