Group items tagged

Two key paras: "7. Moreover, our modelling shows that Green OA is cheaper. When the UK, or any individual country, individual university or research funder seek to make their research freely accessible and usable they must face the cost of doing so, and cannot reap the benefits of free access until others also move to Open Access. With article publishing charges at £1500, adopting Gold OA would cost the UK universities we studied in our "Going for Gold?" report 12 times the cost of adopting Green OA, and for the more research intensive universities going for Gold could cost 25 times as much as going Green. As article processing fees rise, these multiples rise too. 8. The BIS innovation agenda is best served by Green Open Access, which is affordable now. The Finch study lost focus on this because the composition of the Group meant there was a focus on the needs of the academic world and the publishers that serve that constituency. The expensive 'solution' proposed by Finch does virtually nothing for the innovative business sector."

Abstract: "Irrespective of what funds the UK elects to spend on paying pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid, and independent of embargo policy, the UK should (1) mandate and enforce immediate deposit of the author's peer-reviewed final draft of every journal article in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review and research assessment."

Interesting blog post by Stephen Curry from the 25/2/2013 Royal Society's conference "Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research". Excerpt (but the post has a broader focus than this): " I would like to hear more from advocates of a transition based only on green OA mandates on exactly how the ultimate switch to gold OA can be made from the melee of subscription cancellations that they reckon will be the inevitable consequence of the success of their approach, particularly since green OA depends on compliance from the companies and learned societies that will suffer short-term financial losses. The transition problem, whatever the route plotted through it, remains a tough nut to crack. No-one I spoke to at Monday's meeting had a clear idea of how it would occur. We are on an experimental journey feeling our way more or less blindly - a source of occasional but considerable frustration. "

Yesterday, Research Councils UK confirmed it would back down to the government's view, at least for the next half-decade. Although its policy - to go into effect from 1 April - says 6 and 12 months, in practice RCUK (the umbrella body for the UK's seven funding agencies) would not enforce those embargoes, and would permit 12 and 24 month delays - so long as publishers also offered researchers the option of paying up-front to make their work free immediately, an alternative open-access model ....... In the end, it will be the level of enforcement - rather than the policies themselves - that will drive an open access shift.

Media release that starts as follows: Jisc Collections, the UK academic community's shared service for content licensing and administration, has entered into an agreement with Open Access Key (OAK), the online payment platform for open access publishing, to run a 12 month pilot project, Jisc APC, to test its role in managing and processing Gold OA article payment charges made by its member institutions.

Peter Suber's overview of the FASTR is clear and to the point. One key clause: "The NIH budget alone is more than six times larger than the budgets of all seven of the UK research councils put together. Hence, it's significant that FASTR disregards or repudiates the gold-oriented RCUK/Finch policy in the UK, and sticks to the FRPAA model of a pure green mandate. For some of the reasons why I think OA mandates should be green and not gold, or green first, see my critique of the RCUK/Finch policy from September 2012. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9723075"

Executive Summary: "We support the introduction of Open Access to publicly-funded research in a form that will protect and enhance academic freedom and quality in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the STEM subjects. We consider that this is best achieved by a system which: * accepts as equals a Gold route (likely to be taken by many if not most STEM journals) a and a Green route (likely to be taken by many if not most HSS journals); * through planning and consultation develops terms for the Green route which will sustain moderately-costed, high-quality HSS journals, i.e. through differential embargo periods and licenses which permit educational but not derivative or commercial use; * permits UK academics to publish anywhere in the world by allowing for cases where international policies do not follow UK government mandates."

Here is the full transcript of an unprecedentedly speedily convened 28 February 2014 debate on the report of the House of Lords S&T Committee's Inquiry, with several of the members of the committee speaking. A key exchange takes place towards the end when Lord Krebs questions the Government Minister on what he sees as a key issue: Lord Krebs "My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very helpful response. However, will he confirm that RCUK will revise its policy and guidance statement to reflect what he has just said-namely that the research councils will follow the decision tree which has been adopted by BIS and was produced originally by the Publishers Association? The Minister said that that was the Government's position but I want to be clear that RCUK is following that and is revising its guidelines and policy statement." Lord Popat (Conservative - responding on behalf of the Government) "I thank the noble Lord for that question. To the best of the Government's knowledge, RCUK has accepted the decision tree. However, I will write to the noble Lord once we have the paperwork on the implementation, which I believe will be by the end of this month." [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldsctech/122/12206.htm#a6 points to the diagram mentioned]

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicyandRevisedguidance.pdf (to which this media release links) is a revised version of the RCUK guidance on Open Access, published on 6 March and open for comments till 20 March. RCUK will then revise the guidance further to take account of comments received.

Long feature by Paul Jump (with surprisingly few comments) summarising the UK situation from the standpoint of a well-briefed (and possibly thoroughly lobbied) journalist. Has an OA timeline from 2002, and a section about the Open Library of the Humanities.

Conclusions: * RCUK must clarify its policy guidance to reflect its incremental approach to compliance in the initial five-year implementation phase of its open access policy; * RCUK must monitor the effects of its open access policy and its Autumn 2014 review of the policy should consider 6 key points relating to embargo periods, the case for gold; APCs and their impact; impact on Q of peer review; impact on R collaboration; impact on learned societies. * The Government should conduct a full cost-benefit analysis of the policy, in view of their stated preference for gold open access; and * The Government should review the effectiveness of RCUK's consultation regarding this significant change in policy. (RCUK holding response: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130222.aspx indicates that RCUK will shortly be issuing revised guidance on its policy.)

From Poynder's introduction: 'Suber's answers to my ten questions are published below. Personally, what I found noteworthy about them is that - along with most of the interviewees in this series so far - Suber singles out for censure both the Finch Report and the subsequent Research Councils UK (RCUK) OA policy, in which researchers are exhorted to favour gold OA over green OA, and permitted to opt for hybrid OA. Like many OA advocates, Suber also argues that green OA is a more effective and efficient strategy for achieving Open Access than gold OA in the short term. As he puts it, "[I]t's still the case that green scales up faster and less expensively than gold. I want us to work on scaling up gold, developing first-rate OA journals in every field and sustainable ways to pay for them. But that's a long-term project, and we needn't finish it, or even wait another day, before we take the sensible, inexpensive, and overdue step of adopting policies to make our entire research output green OA." He adds, "I still believe that green and gold are complementary, and that in the name of good strategy we should take full advantage of each. From this perspective, my chief disappointment with the RCUK policy is that it doesn't come close to taking full advantage of green."'

Abstract: The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work. This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels. The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost.

Blog post by Martin Eve commenting on the "History Journal Editors' Statement" - http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access with particular emphasis on CC-BY and CC-BY-NC.

Scholarly kitchen article by Alice Meadows of Wiley amongst other things expressing surprise at the lack of strong opposition in science disciplines to the RCUK CC-BY requirement, and drawing attention to the 2012 ALPSP survey of libraries which, she says, shows "a six-month embargo period is likely to result in wholesale cancellations of arts, humanities, and social science journals".

March 27 2013 piece by Jisc's Neil Jacobs summarising the changes that are afoot from 1 April 2013, and highlighting some of the complexities. Concluding paragraph: "Those involved in OA for some time see 2013 as a watershed moment in the UK. However, in reality, this is just the start of a long journey. When I first became involved in OA some 10 years ago, I thought the transition would take 20 years. I still think so."

Tony Hey, now with Microsoft, was in the thick of things in the UK when the original push for (repository based) OA began, so his very balanced observations on Finch and the RCUK OA policy are particularly germane. Key paragraph: "What should RCUK do now? In my opinion, RCUK could make a very small but significant change in its open access policy and adopt a rights-retention green OA mandate that requires 'RCUK-funded authors to retain certain non-exclusive rights and use them to authorize green OA'. In the words of Peter Suber, this would 'create a standing green option regardless of what publishers decide to offer on their own.' In addition, RCUK should recommend that universities follow the Open Access Policy Guidelines of Harvard, set out by their Office of Scholarly Communication. Under this policy, Harvard authors are required to deposit a full text version of their paper in DASH, the Harvard Open Access Repository even in the case where the publisher does not permit open access and the author has been unable to obtain a waiver from the publisher."

Videos, text transcripts, and slides from most if not all of the sessions at a two-day Conference organised by the Academy of Social Sciences, sponsored by the THE, Routledge, Wiley Blackwell and SAGE to look at the implementation of the recommendations of the Finch Review for Open Access publishing in the UK.

Interesting to see that the things which appear to be "text transcripts" are in fact edited notes with a lot of bits missed out. I discovered this by looking at my notes and then checking with the (hits less than 100) You Tube videos. I would not mind this if it made it clear that they had been amended, but it doesn't as far as I can see.