Historians warn minister: hands off our academic freedoms
Proposals by David Willetts are condemned by coalition of academic groups for giving universities a 'stranglehold' over publications
"Senior managers, even if they were once academics, now seem to be following a completely different agenda very much set by government policy. They are running large businesses."
Tristram Hunt, a fellow of the RHS, presenter of TV history programmes and a Labour MP, added that it was "an attack on the quality and integrity of academic research".
All the concerned groups said they agreed with providing easier access to academic research, but Professor Howard Hotson, a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, who sits on the steering council for the Council for the Defence of British Universities, said they all shared grave concerns at the pace of the changes being rolled out.
He said: "One of the things which flabbergasts me is the seemingly insatiable appetite for this government to pursue multiple radical changes simultaneously. It seems extraordinarily naive to suppose that on the basis of a few months of consultation, in a very short space of time, you can radically change the basic way in way academics communicate with each other without having a huge number of unintended knock-on consequences. Open access in principle has a great deal to be said for it, but it has to be handled with care."
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