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 8.15. The challenges will also be acute for many learned societies which rely on surpluses from high-status journals to fund their scholarly and related activities. The surpluses that societies earn from the publication and distribution of successful journals across the world play a vital role in supporting their activities in the UK. Many societies rely on such surpluses for half or more of their income. Recent studies indicate that 90% of some societies’ journal subscription and licence income comes from overseas; and that the great majority of the benefit that societies provide through their non-publishing activities accrues to the UK. If they can make the shift to open access journals on a sustainable basis, learned societies should also be able to maintain many of the services they provide to the research community. We consider these issues further in the following section.

8.16. The challenges do not rest wholly, however, with publishers and learned societies. All parties—funders, universities, and researchers as well as publishers and learned societies—will have to work together to address key issues relating to collaborative research and publication, arrangements to constrain transaction costs, and arrangements for the support of unaffiliated authors. Overall, however, we believe that open access publishing can offer a sustainable mechanism for increasing access, while sustaining high quality research and high-quality services to readers. In seeking to maximise access to the UK’s research publications free at the point of use for the benefit of the greatest number of potential users, we are clear that a policy direction set towards promoting the publication of research articles in open access or hybrid journals is the right course to take.

Licensing extensions

8.17. Since it is clear that licensing will continue to play an important part in the research communications system worldwide for some time to come, effective measures to increase access must include, at least for the short to medium term, extensions to current licensing arrangements. In the short term, indeed, such extensions are the only way to increase access free at the point of use to publications by authors from overseas. Such extensions should aim to increase both the numbers of people and organisations who have licensed access to research publications in the UK, and the numbers of publications accessible to them.

8.18. As we noted in Section 7, although the idea of national licences for the whole UK population has some attractions, we do not believe that it is either practicable or affordable in current circumstances. But there is scope for rationalising and extending licensed access in ways which would bring significant benefits to people and organisations in a range of sectors.

8.19. In the higher education sector, there is growing interest in developing a licence regime which would provide access to a large core of journals for all universities. Such a move would bring real benefits for staff and students in many institutions.