The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, yesterday joined the debate about so-called open access to scientific research, warning that making research freely available on the internet as it is published in scientific journals could harm scientific debate.

The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. "Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society," The Royal Society said.

Its position is a thinly veiled attack on proposals by Research Councils UK - the umbrella body for Britain's eight public backers of research. The body has said researchers should be obliged to place a copy of their work in an online archive, usually connected with a university, preferably at the same time as the work appears in a subscription-based journal.

The Royal Society, which publishes one of the world's oldest journals, Philosophical Transactions, called on the research community to carry out further investigation before adopting any position.

Open access proponents said the Royal Society position statement confuses open access publishing, in which authors pay for their research to be published on the web, with author self-archiving. The latter, which has already been carried out in some disciplines for years, relies on academics publishing on the internet articles that have been accepted by journals.

A spokesman for the Royal Society said: "We think it conceivable that the journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?"