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 mean that staff and students in universities and in the health sector will enjoy a much more integrated information environment.

Access to the great majority of journals and articles for walk-in users of public libraries across the UK will make a real and substantial difference to many people and organisations, especially if it is accompanied by effective marketing, training for librarians, and guidance for users. It will also bring a significant enhancement of the role of public libraries in their local communities.

For people and organisations in the public, business and voluntary sectors, exploration of the scope for extensions to licensing for online access will be a step towards wider availability, providing evidence of its value. We hope that some testbeds will be established by consortia of organisations in specific sectors.

Repositories

The further development of repositories will make them better integrated and interoperable, and higher standards of accessibility will bring greater use by both authors and readers. Institutional repositories will develop the roles they perform for their universities, both in providing a showcase for their research and in supporting research information management systems. In the wider scholarly communications sphere, repositories will develop their roles in preserving and providing access to research data, to theses, and to grey literature.

Subject-based repositories will continue to develop refine their roles alongside publishers and their platforms, especially in those areas where such repositories operate effectively already, and have an established position in researchers’ regular workflows.

Overall

Implementation of the balanced programme we recommend will mean that more people and organisations in the UK have access to more of the published findings of research than ever before. More research will be accessible immediately upon publication, and free at the point of use. Our recommended programme will accelerate the progress towards a fully open access environment in the UK, and we hope that it will contribute to similar acceleration in the rest of the world. We believe that such movement will bring substantial benefits in transparency and accountability, engagement with research and its findings, closer linkages between research and innovation, and improved efficiency in the research process itself. Our work has shown how representatives of the different stakeholder groups can work together to find ways to achieve those ends.