The U.K. government has decided to move ahead with a plan to provide open access to published publicly funded research, with the ultimate goal of making all publicly funded research available to everyone. Under the new open access system, authors will pay article processing charges (the cost of which will be included as a part of grant funding) to journals in order to cover the cost of having their work peer-reviewed, edited, and published online. These articles will then be openly accessible to everyone. The transition to open access is expected to take about two years, and may cost £50 million a year.
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