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 American and other major research nations may remain accessible only on payment of a subscription or PPV charge.

8.25. Nevertheless, measures in the UK to encourage the further development and use of repositories could lead to significant improvements in access to publications and reports arising from UK research. The benefits would be perceived within universities in facilitating research management, in providing a showcase for research outputs and expertise, and in providing a mechanism for the management of research data. Perhaps more important for our purposes would be the benefits arising from access to research results for those, outside higher education and the large R&D-intensive companies, who cannot afford large subscription packages One of the keys to achieving such benefits is effective co-operation between repositories and publishers, such as is already evident, for example, in the case of UKPMC.

8.26. We recognise, however, that there are tensions between the interests of subscription-based publishers and those promoting the use of repositories. The terms of the relationships between repositories and publishers are thus particularly important because—for all the reasons outlined in the previous section and elsewhere in this report—it is unlikely that either institutional or subject-based repositories could by themselves provide a satisfactory model for a research communications system that involves the effective publication and dissemination of quality-assured research findings. In a digital world where ‘everything is miscellaneous’ users need an array of services to provide effective signals to help them navigate to the publications that are most relevant and important for their purposes, and of the highest quality. Quality assurance through peer review, coupled with the wide range of discovery, navigation, linking and related services provided by publishers and other intermediaries are thus of critical importance to both authors and users of research publications.

8.27. As we have noted earlier, open access journals secure their revenues to support such services at the point of publication, through their APCs. Hence it is relatively straightforward for them to co-operate with repositories which simply provide an additional channel—alongside their own publisher platform—for access to the articles they publish.

8.28. Subscription-based publishers, on the other hand, recoup most of the costs of such services through the fees they charge for licences to gain access to journals and articles precisely on their own platforms. Other channels for access are rivals, not complements to those platforms. Hence they impose restrictions on access via repositories—embargo periods, restrictions on the version of the article that can be deposited and its functionality, and restrictions on rights of use and re-use—in order to preserve their licence revenues and the viability of their journals. As we noted earlier in this report, such restrictions seem to have been effective in limiting the usefulness of repositories, and hence any potential adverse impact on journals