As the editor of an online journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, now entering its fourth year with 1,100 registered readers, I was delighted to read such strong endorsement of open access publishing from the director of the Wellcome Trust, Mark Walport, and others (Wellcome joins 'academic spring' to open up science, 10 April).
The Walport case was based on meeting the operational costs of open access to scientific literature through charges levied on authors that the Wellcome Trust is prepared to meet in relation to its own funded research. But this skates round another problem. As we know from running an interdisciplinary journal, many authors do not have access to such support; hence if we were to charge for publication, open access to authorship, if not to readership, would be effectively barred to them.
It would make sense for the major research funders to establish a funding pool to which open access journals could apply for meeting at least some of their costs directly. A multidisciplinary conference would be the obvious first step.
Prof John Bynner
Executive editor, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies
• So-called open access publishing of scientific research requires the author to pay to publish. Open access is therefore a closed shop. Only people affiliated to an organisation which will pay on their behalf can publish. There may be very few scientists like myself who have no such affiliation and who work for free with no funding, but our work would have no peer-reviewed outlet if all journals went this way.
Rick Bradford
Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire
• This is a brilliant initiative from the Wellcome Trust. However, four years ago a small charity in Switzerland had the same vision, and started ecancer.org online, completely free to view, with no author publishing charges. Published in Bristol, ecancer is thriving, and is now read by 40,000 oncologists each month in 191 countries.
The Wellcome Trust can take another lead, namely remove impact factor as one of the major determinants of screening grant applications. This "factor" is a clever device invented by the expensive journals to reward articles in their journals, to reinforce their importance to scientists who require grant funding for a living.
Professor Gordon McVie
European Institute of Oncology, Milan; ecancer, Bristol
• Online access to academic articles is crucial for researchers in humanities as well as science (How an angry maths blog grew into a new scientific revolution, 10 April). However, the present publisher-led system ensures that while fee contracts with universities make a range of journals available online to their members, universities cannot in any circumstances extend this service to individual researchers, including alumni.
As the Wellcome Trust director Sir Mark Walport discovered, without automatic accesss researchers are faced with charges of £25 to be allowed to read a single article! Co-ordinating bodies such as JSTOR are trying to breach this huge financial structure on behalf of researchers outside the academy, but with very minor outcomes so far.
Dr Tricia Cusack
Birmingham
• Any chance that those nice people at Wellcome might lend some of their millions to liberate arts and humanities publishing from its Elsevier incubus too?
David Crouch
Hull
• Can we please stop talking about "the closed world of academia"? Restricting access to published research has nothing to do with academics. We are seldom paid for writing, or for peer-reviewing other academics' work; and we are in the invidious position of writing research papers which our students cannot then read because our library budgets have been cut. Our problem is that we are tied to the assessment for the Research Excellence Framework, and our managers still insist that our research will not count unless it is published in a notional "A-list" of journals. We want to share our research as widely as possible, but if we allow free access to our publications the "A-list" journals will reject them and we will end up on the scrapheap. Distinguished mathematicians from Cambridge may be able to take the risk, but not threatened lecturers in the humanities in the new community universities.
We cannot tackle this problem on our own initiative. It requires a reframing of the assessment process for the REF and pressure from the key funding bodies. Welcome, Wellcome!
Maddy Gray
Cardiff
• It is not only scientists that have difficulty accessing research journals. As a now self-employed researcher, pensioned off due to public service cuts, I find that I cannot remotely access electronic sources because I am not employed at or a student of a higher education institute. Even being an external borrower of university libraries does not allow access. An alternative would be to use public libraries as in the US, but this is almost nonexistent, except for bodies like the British Library or the National Library of Wales, where the access is on-site only. This situation will not improve due to funding cuts to public libraries. So much for the widening of the UK research base and making use of skills and knowledge built up over many years.
Dr Alun Thomas
Cannock, Staffordshire
• The most effective way of tackling the the behaviour of academic publishers is for the Office of Fair Trading to launch a market study. It has the powers to ask for changes in areas where no explicit anti-competitive behaviour is going on but firms are still not operating in consumers' interests. As you say (Editorial, 11 April), this is an open and shut case of such an area.
Anil Patel
London