Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what mechanisms his Department uses to share best practice with other Government Departments on including provisions on affordable access in research and development grants.

This Government supports open access to research publications, following the Finch Report in 2012, and further advice from Professor Adam Tickell in 2016. It is for the Research Councils and Funding Councils (and, soon, UK Research and Innovation) to implement open access within their arrangements for grants and other instruments. The Research Councils make available block grants to enable universities to make publications arising from their research open access.

Best practice in this regard is for research publications to be open access, that is, freely available for all to read on the internet, and for research data to be “FAIR”. We support the recent G7 communique that proposes that “research data should adhere to the FAIR principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable”. This does not mean that such data should always be open, as there are circumstances in which that would not be appropriate, for example where personal confidentiality or national security might be put at risk. Best practice is shared with other Government departments, primarily through the work of the Government Office for Science, and the Chief Scientific Advisors in Government departments across Whitehall.