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 4. The Current State of Access in the UK

The UK Research Base: Inputs and Outputs

4.1. UK research is distinctive in a number of ways. Gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) has grown only modestly as a share of GDP, and on that measure of research and development intensity the UK is significantly below most key comparator countries and international benchmarks. But research in the UK is heavily concentrated in the HE sector: 28% of R&D is conducted in that sector, considerably higher than the averages for the G8 and the EU, and higher than that for all comparator countries except Canada. Conversely, the proportion of R&D conducted in the business sector, at 60%, is lower than the G8 average, although in line with the EU average; and the proportion funded by the business sector, at 45%, is markedly lower than the G8 average of 65%. The UK is strongly dependent on Government, charitable and overseas sources of funding for its R&D.

4.2. The UK’s longstanding focus on university-based research is reflected in the distribution of the 250k researchers in the UK, and in the kinds of outputs it produces. The UK is very successful in producing high-quality research publications, but relatively weak in producing other kinds of outputs such as patents. Research does not operate like a production line where resources are put in at one end, and results leading to innovative products and services come out at the other end. Rather, it functions as an eco-system with complex and intricate interdependencies. Nevertheless, it is entirely appropriate that there should be repeated efforts to improve the connectivity between the research base in universities on the one hand, and the innovation system on the other; and improving access to published research findings is one way of facilitating such efforts. This section outlines the routes through which access is currently provided, and examines the levels of access for different sectors in the UK.

4.3. UK researchers are highly efficient and productive: among the top five research countries (US, China, Japan and Germany alongside the UK), they generate more articles, more usage, and more citations per researcher and per unit of research spend than their competitors. The rise in the number of articles published by UK authors has not been as fast as in the very high-growth countries such as India and Brazil mentioned in the previous section; and since 2006 it has been lower, at 2.9% a year, than the world average. As a result, the UK’s share of the global total of articles fell from 6.7% in 2006 to 6.4% in 2010. Nevertheless, UK researchers’ rate