The date for publication of the latest instalment has been announced: on 1st February at 11 am the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee will publish their latest report on Open Access, its Third Special Report of Session 2004–05, Responses to the Committee's Tenth Report, Session 2003–04, Scientific Publications: Free for all?: Responses to the Committee's 14th Report of Session 2003–04 (HC 249).
This will include the Government's and the Office of Fair Trading's Response to their previous report in which the Committee noted, "We are disappointed that the Government has missed the opportunity to take more decisive action in response to our Report. We recommend that the Government reconsider its position on this important issue in the light of the other responses to our Report published here; the forthcoming RCUK policy on the publication of, and access to, research outputs; and in view of the support for the Committee’s stance from the Wellcome Trust, an important research funder. In this context, we do not believe that Government should continue to refuse to provide the modest funds necessary to make institutional repositories workable, and to allow the experimentation necessary to properly test the feasibility of the author-pays publishing model. "