Who Owns, Who Pays? U.K., U.S. Offer Answer for Journals.

Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are stoking the debate over free access to electronic scientific journals. In Great Britain, a government body announced last month that it will pay the publication costs of any British university researcher who submits a paper to open-access journals published by BioMed Central, a London-based company. And last week a member of the U.S. Congress introduced a bill aimed at preventing private publishers from monopolizing information by denying copyright protection to work produced with substantial government funding. Some open-access advocates welcome both moves as a means to improve the flow of scholarly information. Some researchers and academic librarians have long complained that the public pays twice for science once when the government funds a study and again when universities use public funds to buy journals that publish the results. Several groups have responded with free Web journals financed by page charges paid by authors. The U.S. legislation, introduced on June 26, 2003 by Representative Martin Sabo, would bar copyright protection for any work produced pursuant to scientific research substantially funded by the federal government. The Great Britain government has now given BioMed Central a major boost by agreeing to pay article fees for academic researchers who publish in its open-access journals.