This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Walport Report | |
|---|---|
| Name | Walport Report |
| Author | Sir Mark Walport |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Scientific publishing, Research integrity, Peer review |
| Published | 2012 |
| Publisher | Department for Business, Innovation and Skills |
| Pages | 56 |
Walport Report
The Walport Report was a 2012 policy review led by Sir Mark Walport commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Medical Research Council to examine access to published scientific research funded by public bodies. The report evaluated open access models, peer review mechanisms, publishing costs, and repository infrastructure, recommending steps to reshape relationships among researchers, publishers, funders, and institutions. Its findings influenced subsequent policies from the Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The review originated amid debates at events like the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities over how to deliver taxpayer-funded research to the public. It followed policy shifts by organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and directives from the European Commission emphasizing open access to research outputs. The 2010 coalition led by the Conservative Party (UK) and the Liberal Democrats (UK) prioritized transparency in publicly funded research, prompting the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to commission expert advice. The review team consulted stakeholders including representatives from Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media, Nature Publishing Group, Royal Society, Wellcome Trust, Science (journal), and universities belonging to the Russell Group and the Universities UK consortium.
Walport advocated a transition toward a mixed open access framework combining the "gold" route (open access publishing fees) and "green" route (institutional repositories). He recommended that funders such as the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust mandate open access within six months to twelve months of publication, with stronger emphasis on article processing charges being met by funders or institutions rather than individual researchers. The report proposed that the Research Councils UK harmonize policies across agencies and that universities upgrade repository infrastructure compatible with systems like PubMed Central and the CLOCKSS archive. It urged publishers including Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis to adopt transparent pricing and to decouple peer review from access barriers by encouraging post-publication commentary akin to platforms used by PLoS and bioRxiv preprint servers. The review recommended that metrics beyond Journal Citation Reports and the Impact Factor—such as alternative metrics used by Altmetric providers—be considered by funders and institutions for appraisal and reward systems.
Following the report, the Research Councils UK updated mandates, and the Wellcome Trust accelerated its open access policy, increasing uptake of repositories like Europe PubMed Central. Publishers negotiated transformative agreements with consortia including the Jisc and alliances of Australian Research Council partners. The report influenced the development of institutional policies at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and other members of the Russell Group to support compliance with funder mandates. Financial arrangements evolved as funders such as the Medical Research Council allocated block grants to universities, and commercial publishers experimented with hybrid models used by Nature Communications and Scientific Reports. The report’s emphasis on infrastructure helped expand services provided by organizations such as CrossRef, ORCID, and the Digital Science portfolio, improving discoverability and linking of outputs.
The report was praised by advocates including the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society for clarifying funder responsibilities and stimulating dialogue with publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature. Critics from certain publisher associations argued that recommendations underestimated costs to subscription-based businesses represented by Reed Elsevier and that six- to twelve-month embargoes would disrupt revenue models used by journals such as The Lancet and The BMJ. Some academic groups, including factions within Universities UK and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators, warned that shifting article processing charge burdens could disadvantage early-career researchers and institutions outside the Russell Group. Debates invoked precedents from the NIH Public Access Policy and controversies around paywalling practices criticized in campaigns by Open Knowledge Foundation and SPARC.
The Walport-led guidance contributed to later policy instruments such as the Research Excellence Framework discussions on responsible metrics and eventual national moves toward immediate open access in some contexts, echoed by the Plan S initiative led by cOAlition S. It helped pave the way for transformative agreements negotiated by consortia like SCOAP3 in physics and national deals involving publishers such as Wiley and Springer Nature. Institutional adoption of persistent identifiers—DOI, ORCID—and improvements to repository services trace part of their impetus to the report. The report remains cited in policy analyses by bodies including the European Research Council, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Health Organization when assessing open access trajectories and the economics of scholarly communication.
Category:Open access Category:United Kingdom reports Category:Academic publishing reforms