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 conclusions are justified by the results and methodology presented, rather than on assessment of the relative importance of the research or perceived level of interest it will generate—has stimulated further growth. Established publishers such as American Institute of Physics, Nature Publishing Group, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) Group, and SAGE Publications in the social sciences, have all launched similar journals in the past couple of years. PLoSOne is now by some counts the largest journal in the world. Such journals play a role different from the highly-selective journals which seek to present only the best and most significant research in their fields.

Funders’ policies

3.44. Major funders of research began from 2005 to introduce policies to promote open access to the published findings of the research they fund. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US introduced a policy requiring that scientists should submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts arising from NIH funding to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication; and that they should be accessible to the public no later than 12 months after publication. In the UK, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee issued a report in 2004 recommending that research funders should require that published findings should be deposited in institutional repositories, and that there should be a further study of the funding of open access journals. In response to that report, Research Councils UK (RCUK) produced in 2005 and 2006 position statements outlining a requirement that articles should be deposited in repositories, but recognising that access would depend on copyright and licensing arrangements relating, for example, to embargo periods. The Wellcome Trust introduced a policy requiring that published outputs of the research that it funds should be made available through PubMedCentral within six months of publication; and it complemented that policy with arrangements to meet the costs of the APCs charged by open access publishers.

3.45. Similar policies were introduced from 2006 onwards by a range of organisations including the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DfG) in Germany, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The European Union’s interest in open access was reinforced by its funding of initiatives to support the development of Europe-wide