Academic Spring: Phase Two

In case you have not been watching this Spring’s coming, since the spectacular Harvard development of two weeks ago, another large tree, the UK government, has bloomed.  Its Minister of State for Universities and Science announced last week that beginning in the near future all UK publicly funded academic research will be available on the Web free of charge to anyone anywhere in the world.  This is not a politician’s pipe dream; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has already been hired to set it up.

In effect, the right-of-centre government minister said enough is enough, that this is a business model too odious to be tolerated.  No longer will The Big Five (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Sage and Francis and Taylor) be allowed to stop society from freely accessing research funded by the UK taxpayer.