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 3.48. When funders and institutions began to develop policies to promote open access, especially access via repositories, both commercial and learned society publishers that publish subscription-based journals tended to see them as a threat. Many such publishers saw the prospect of a requirement that articles should be made available through institutional and subject-based repositories, after what was seen as a relatively short embargo period, as a threat to their revenues and even to the survival of their journals, with the prospect of sales falling as swift, free access became accessible via repositories. Learned societies saw a threat to the publishing income that sustains many of their charitable scholarly and public engagement activities; and also to their income from members who are often attracted by society publications as a membership benefit. Some learned societies have also expressed concerns that allowing use and re-use of research results on open access terms might limit the UK’s ability to exploit those results commercially.

3.49. The reaction of many publishers and learned societies to the policies introduced by funding agencies and others was therefore to put restrictions around what could be deposited in repositories, and the rights associated with it. Thus many publishers insisted that only the manuscript submitted to them by the author or, more commonly, the manuscript accepted for publication after peer review, could be made available, rather than the ‘version of record’ copy-edited and marked up by the publisher. And in addition to embargo periods, publishers sought to restrict the rights of readers to re-use material deposited in repositories. These issues are considered more fully in Sections 4 and 7.

3.50. Subscription-based publishers’ reactions to the development of open access journals were more mixed. Many were initially hostile, suggesting that the new journals represented a lowering of standards, or that they were not sustainable without heavy subsidy. Others including Oxford University Press and the Institute of Physics responded by launching their own open access journals alongside their existing subscription-based ones, or by developing the hybrid model. Most of the larger scholarly publishers now provide a mix of options in this way.