Loz Kaye - Party Leader

It's certainly never a dull moment as PP-UK Leader. Since my last update I have been busy advocating for our politics, including a lecture at the London School of Economics, meetings at the House of Commons, attending events about open data and taking part at the international "Rethinking the Internet" conference in Venice.

The Party is coming out of a fairly hectic period, we have a new treasurer, a new press officer, many new board members and we have been working hard to deal with the transitions as well as all the correspondence and ideas that have come in from members and non-members alike. So, for the last month or so much of our focus has been internal and it is about time we turned back to the work that actually gets our ideas out to people in the UK.

So, over the next few days we will be going over out what the campaigns team has and will be working on in the next few months.  If you have any suggestions or want to get involved in any way, let us know.

This post also talks about Local Organisation,  a Candidates Call, European Elections, another call for board candidates and more..

A large proportion of academic research in the UK is taxpayer-funded. The money comes either via grants from the Research Councils, on which the government spends approximately £3 billion each year, or directly to universities from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which in 2011-12 distributed £1.6 billion.

The transformative potential of world-class research is pretty clear. In the last few years alone, UK researchers have developed the wonder material graphene and discovered the body of Richard III, among other things. Yet, in a curious and inequitable twist of fate, the results of this research have for the most part never been made available to the taxpayers who funded it. Instead, research findings are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals run by private publishing companies. In the modern era, these largely take the form of PDFs behind pay-walls, tantalisingly close and yet inaccessible to those who aren't willing to fork out $40 per view. Universities and libraries, meanwhile, can buy back-breakingly expensive subscriptions to this content. The net result of all this is that research findings are available only to the wealthy and to research institutions themselves, and even then only at great cost.