On Friday, Lord David Sainsbury stepped down from his position as UK science minister. However we may hear from him on UK science policy one more time before he leaves the public stage:
Lord Sainsbury has agreed to carry out a review of science and innovation policies across government – taking a forward look at what needs to be done to ensure the UK’s success in wealth creation and scientific policy-making. He will report to the Chancellor and the Secretaries of State at DTI and the Department for Education and Skills.
Sainsbury has been the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation in the Department of Trade and Industry since July 1998. (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)
David Sainsbury is the UK official most responsible for rejecting the OA recommendations (July 2004) of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Those recommendations were based on extensive fact-finding and in their basic terms have been reaffirmed and adopted by just about every other government since then that has closely examined the same issues.
Thanks to a document unearthed by David Prosser through the UK Freedom of Information Act, we know that during the time when Sainsbury was supposed to be evaluating the OA recommendations, he met with OA opponents roughly twice as often as with OA proponents, and met with the Reed Elsevier CEO three times more often than any other stakeholder.
As a result of Sainsbury's partiality, strong OA policy in the UK was delayed by about two years --the time between the House of Commons recommendations (July 2004) and the adoption of the RCUK policy (June 2006). And for the record, we should note that the RCUK could adopt its strong OA policy only because it was independent of Sainsbury's authority, as Sainsbury himself noted in March 2005 testimony before the Science and Technology Committee (scroll to Questions 20 and following).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/12/2006 12:25:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
