The UK is losing around £1.5bn annually because of its failure to embrace open access publishing, according to an open access advocate.
Stevan Harnad, of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through what he views as the limitations of the current academic publishing environment.
"Research councils spend £3.5bn of government money annually funding British science," said Prof Harnad. "This results in around 130,000 articles published each year in research journals, but the publication alone does not reflect the return on the UK's investment."
Prof Harnad calculates the value on the basis of the number of times research is cited by other researchers, known as research impacts. He claims that citation impacts are being lost to the UK each year by the inaccessibility of research papers.
He revealed today that at least £1.5bn could be made each year through research impacts if a universal policy of self-archiving was adopted.
"This is actually a conservative estimate," said Prof Harnad. "It also takes no account of the much wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry."
At the end of August, the UK research councils, which control billions of pounds worth of funding, announced their intention to make free access on the internet a condition of grants in a bid to give British research more impact around the world.
The move was backed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, and other academics.
But publishers who fear that open access will hit sales and damage the UK's 25% share in the £7bn worldwide learned journals market have lobbied hard against the proposal. Both sides believe the battle has reached a critical stage.
Ian Diamond, the chief executive of Research Councils UK, the umbrella body representing the eight research councils, has proposed that from October academics archive final versions of their papers in repositories belonging to their own universities or subject bodies. These would not be edited, and possibly corrected, by a journal, but would be available free of charge to other researchers via the internet.
In response, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), whose members publish more than 8,000 journals, has written privately to Prof Diamond seeking consultation and urging delay.
The policy would not only damage big publishers, but also hurt scores of learned societies that publish journals, said Sally Morris, the association's chief executive.
Journals organise the all-important peer review process, which is the quality control for research and this has to be paid for somehow, she pointed out, although the academics involved do it for free.
Once all of a journal's content was available free online, university librarians would stop buying it, she said. The advent of Google Scholar meant it was now easy to find the contents of a journal scattered among different repositories.
"We are worried that the research councils in the UK are trying to push in the direction of a parallel economy without thinking of the possible damage to the journals on which they parasitise.
Prof Harnad has dismissed the publishers' fears. "Not only are these claims unsubstantiated, but all the evidence to date shows the reverse to be true: not only do journals thrive and co-exist alongside author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it - both in terms of more citations and more subscriptions," he said.