The British government has issued a lukewarm verdict on a new model of academic publishing that shifts costs from subscribers to authors, and poses a threat to the business model of publishers such as Reed Elsevier.
Under the "open-access" model, authors pay for the costs of publishing their results, including distribution and peer review, and the publications are then provided free of charge on the Internet.
The Public Library of Science, for example, launched PLoS Medicine last month as a challenger to The Lancet, the prestigious subscription-only medical journal owned by Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch firm that is the world's largest publisher of scientific journals.
A government advisory board issued a report in July calling for further exploration of open-access publishing, also known as the "author-pays" model, including a proposal for mandatory dissemination of publicly funded research on the Internet after publication.
But a government report from several agencies led by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said on Monday that it had "no present intention" of taking such a step.
"The evidence produced so far suggests that the author-pays model could be viable," the government said in its report, but it noted that the costs of open-access publishing models, which could range from 300 pounds to 2,500 pounds per article, "are not still not clear."