A new independent working group has been set up to examine access to UK-funded research findings. Representatives of the HE sector, research funders, the research community, scholarly publishers and libraries will make recommendations on how research findings can be made more easily accessible.

The Research Information Network (RIN) made this announcement regarding the group: "The group will propose a programme of action and make recommendations to government, research funders, publishers and other interested parties on how access to research findings and outcomes can be broadened for key audiences such as researchers, policy makers and the general public."

The group will be focusing on academic publications, which means that the issue of open access publishing will certainly be coming into play. Free access to journal articles has greatly increased in the last ten years, but it still accounts for less than 10 per cent of the 1.5 million scholarly papers published each year, according to the Publishers Association in the UK.

This situation is something that non-profit publishers like ecancer are striving to change. The journal ecancermedicalscience is one of the tiny number of fully peer reviewed cancer journals which does not charge author processing fees or subscription charges. The research it publishes is therefore freely available to all, at no extra cost to funding organisations, universities or individual academics.

An article recently published in the journal, "An Open Access future? Report from the eurocancercoms project" Kenny R and Warden R 5 223, demonstrates the detrimental effect of publishing costs and access to information on cancer research. The authors found that a quarter of cancer researchers experience difficulty gaining access to what their peers have published, and that they are compelled to spend valuable time tracking down and supplying themselves with such publications without incurring high costs which they are unable to meet.

Hopefully the members of this new working group will highlight the need for increased open access publishing and the days of publishers charging prohibitively large fees will soon be coming to an end.