After all the excitement of open access (OA) developments last Friday, there was a chance to take stock this Monday at the Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. The meeting, which aimed to examine “the background to the new policy announced by David Willetts in July 2012, including the recommendations of the Finch working group, and (to) address the practical challenges of

Well that was quick. Less than a month after the Finch working group published its recommendations on the future of open access, UK science minister David Willetts has responded, saying in effect “Let’s go for it.” The government has taken essentially all of the recommendations on board and has committed the country to making all its publicly-funded research available for free online by 2014. Except that it’s not quite that simple.

The Finch Committee, set up last year by David Willetts to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible — and mentioned by the minister in his speech on the subject earlier this week — has been meeting regularly and is due to report within weeks. If you would like to find out more about the committee’s deliberations, you can.

David Willetts, Britain’s minister for science and universities, trailed the announcements made in his speech on open access to the UK Publishers’ Association yesterday as a ‘seismic shift’. One learns to be wary of the more hyperbolic statements of government ministers but I was at least left wondering whether the earth had moved for the publishers in the room.

The open access buzz around the internet last week was all due to the announcement by senior faculty at Harvard that journal subscription prices were rising at an unsustainable rate and the call to colleagues to devote their publishing energies to open access titles.