Group items tagged

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.

"Research results published through Open Access on the Internet are available for anyone to read and download. Researchers who receive funding from Formas from 2010 and onwards must guarantee that their research findings will be available through Open Access within six months of publication. Researchers may either publish in journals with an Open Access practice or those that archive published articles in large public access databases. The Open Access regulations currently only apply to scientifically peer-reviewed text published in scientific journals and conference reports. The regulations do not currently apply to monographs or book chapters. Funding to cover publication costs in Open Access journals can be included in research project applications as a direct cost."

Open Access Research and the Future for Academic Publishing. PDF of PPT used by Martin Hall, VC of the University of Salford, Chair of OAIG, and member of the Finch Group at 5/2/2013 Westminster Higher Education Forum

Somewhat ill informed attack on "the historians" asserting that the latter's hostility to Finch involved fear of "casting pearls before proles", and that it is the "cost of checking and editing" that has stopped the Internet bringing down the costs of scholarly publishing. [Some of the comments on the piece are interesting.]

Blog post with dialogue in the comments section between the author and Stevan Harnad. Concluding para: "Open Access publishing is itself a complex, and currently controversial, issue. The "Green" versus "Gold" debate, though, is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent - excellent - posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard's Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication."

Coherent and thoroughly argued piece, with some telling and informative calculations in paragraph 7, and an interesting suggestion that APC fee-capping be introduced.

13 January 2013 post by Martin Paul Eve on the beginnings of a possible PLOS for Humanities and Social Sciences

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.

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.)

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."

Long and comprehensive piece by Richard Poynder examining the schism between those who recommend Gold and those who recommend Green.

Blog post by Mike Taylor charting what he sees as a gradual weakening of the RCUK OA policy since RCUK published its March 2012 draft. He concludes: "Can anyone doubt that the nobbling of a truly progressive policy was the result of lobbying by a truly regressive publishing industry? It's been a tragedy to watch this policy erode away from something dramatic to almost nothing. Once more, it's publishers versus everyone else. Again, I have to ask this very simple question: why do we tolerate the obvious conflict of interest in allowing publishers to have any say at all in deciding how our government spends public money on publication services?"

HEFCE seeks early input to help shape a consultation that it will be undertaking later in 2013. Six questions posed, relating mainly to the extent to which OA is mandated by HEFCE for outputs that are included in the next REF (in, say, 2020). Deadline for responses: 25 March 2013.

Article by John Casey which also appeared in the Arts Libraries Journal vol. 37 No..2 201. Abstract: "This article provides an introduction to the use of the Creative Commons licence system and sets it in a historical, economic and political context. It is written from the perspective of involvement in open educational projects in an Arts university that has used the licences. A description of the fundamental features of the licences and their uses is given together with an outline of how the Creative Commons organisation works and its strategic aims. An assessment of the usefulness of the licences is provided together with a description of the challenges faced in dealing with low levels of legal awareness amongst academics. Practical advice and sources of further information and guidance are offered to help readers implement the licences locally."

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."'