Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has been recruited by the UK government as part of its move to make all taxpayer-funded academic research from the UK freely available online.

David Willetts, the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, made the open access announcement yesterday at the Publishers Association annual general meeting in London.

The move is significant. According to Willetts, "The UK has many of the leading academic journals globally - of the world's 23,000 peer-reviewed journals, 5,000 are published from the UK."