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.

This is astonishing. Harvard is one of the best and one of the wealthiest universities in the world but last week its Faculty Advisory Council* announced that it can no longer afford to maintain its subscriptions to academic journals. The announcement was made online by the Council as a message to the academic staff at the university. I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full below.

What’s your favourite colour? Anyone who has socialised with small children will have been confronted with this serious-faced interrogation at some point. It’s the sort of question that erupts as soon as young kids learn to verbalise the jumble of perceptions filling up minds that are untidier than bedrooms. It’s the sort of question that is too often discarded in the mis-named process of growing up. So what do you answer? Blue? Green?

I had an argument with my colleague in the tea-room the other day. Gratifyingly, I learned he had been reading my blogposts on the subject of open access, but it soon became clear he did not entirely share my enthusiasm for the topic. Specifically, he criticised open access journals such as PLoS ONE both for their lack of sub-editorial services and for creating a home for poor quality science.

Scientists should do this. Journalists should do that. And eventually we will live in a world where the media reporting of science achieves perfection. At least that is the hypothesis. The hypothesis was put to the test at the Royal Institution last night in a discussion organised by Alok Jha and chaired by Alice Bell.

On the Guardian web-site today you will find a piece by myself and Imran Khan of CaSE which is a response to an attack on scientists for striking a faustian bargain with business.   The attack was written by Ananyo Bhattacharya, who is the chief online editor for Nature and, funnily enough, a former PhD student of mine. We’re still good friends, by the way!

This morning there have been two very interesting developments on open access. First, Doug Kell, Chief Executive of the BBSRC, responded on his blog to my open letter. His reply is detailed and goes some way to clarifying progress in the approaches that Research Councils will take to improve uptake of OA publishing options. I would encourage you to read it and respond.

Short Version Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. And then adopt it. Thank you. Long Version Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. It’s short so I’ve pasted it below. The policy states (with my emphases in purple): As a policy it is clear and purposeful. It is built upon the principle that OA is good for science and good for the public.