"But they do show the influence that the UK is having on international debates." Considering that the UK proposal was unveiled yesterday, perhaps this wasn't an influence - but an independent will?
The author is from the UK. If you read a bit more, you discover that the EU has already been doing a pilot on the FP7 research framework for 20% of the publications and has already built the infrastructure to support the open access. A lot of universities all over Europe are also putting their research results in open access databases. So, take it as a bit of biased reporting in the middle of some really encouraging developments.
That's what I was thinking about ;)
Oh and to my knowledge no other nation has gone further on open access than the UK to date (not even the US where the NIH mandated submission to open access repository after 12 months).
Though the UK has been mulling the policy for quite a while too (as you can see from the links in the story). At least a year. (The UK also enlisted Jimmy Wales to work out its policy in May.)
I'm glad for both the UK and the EU; this doesn't need to be a competition. I just found that remark amusing, like the famous headline "Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off" :D
Good point!
Though it wouldn't be such a bad thing for different countries to compete on!
That's quite laughable given that the very article is written by the UK-based for-profit publisher (and part of the science oligopoly), Nature Publishing Group.
Nature has been an unapologetic advocate of open-access publishing for as long as I've been reading it.
For the record, NPG actually supports the form of open access being put forward by the UK and the EU (check out the statements on their website). The company already complies with the 6 month rule and helps authors deposit in PubMed Central. It also runs a number of open access and hybrid model journals...