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Whether or not you agree with any or all of it, this superbly written 5 page PDF by Colin Jones and Peter Mandler provides a coherent and very comprehensive summary of H&SS concerns about current OA policy in the UK, and its impact. The nine aspects covered are: the gold question; green issues; publishers' business models; universities and gold/green; universities as publication gatekeepers; a way out of rationing; freedom to publish; internationalisation. All set against a backdrop of RHS reiterating its "strong support for widening access to publicly-funded academic work, in forms that sustain peer review and high-quality editorial work."

But if the sciences can do it, why not also the humanities and social sciences? Long, enthusiastic but basically exhortatory piece by Gary F Daught promoting "bright and energetic young scholar" Martin Eve's idea.

RLUK's response is forcefully supportive of the current policy, and firmly dismissive of HSS objections to short embargo periods. But does it sidestep the longer term concerns of learned societies?

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. "

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]

Mike Taylor writes sceptically about Green OA highlighting practical risks of relying on institutional repositories, and pointing to four "in principal" reasons for scepticism: the "two class" system; the expense of continuing subscriptions; embargoes; and non-open licences.

Jeffrey Beall highlights IEEE's announcement "IEEE has just announced that it will be starting a new gold open-access mega-journal to be called IEEE Access. In launching the journal, the publisher has also coined a new term for the journal's genre: Multidisciplinary Open AccessMega Journal (MOAMJ)."

A. Townsend Peterson, Ada Emmett and Marc Greenberg article in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Excerpt: "By seeking 'author-pays' models as a main means of making OA journals viable, academia creates another problem: a scholarly communication world in which access is open to readers, but not to authors. Academia is globalizing rapidly, with a growing proportion of top researchers working in developing countries. If public monies are to be used to finance shifts to completely OA journals ('Gold' OA systems) via taxpayer subsidy (see, e.g., Finch, 2012), for example, business models will have to be examined carefully to assure that global wealth distribution does not translate into new imbalances in access to scholarly communication. That is, commercial gold OA journals will not necessarily solve this problem for less-prosperous individuals, institutions, or countries. As scholars struggle to open access globally, they must avoid the trap of assuming that all competent authors will have resources for publication charges (or the gumption to request fee waivers), such that some authors with important insights end up effectively excluded from this system."

An attack on what the author sees as a ham-fisted ad-hoc bit of policy-making and policy-adjustment. Excerpt: "... unilateral gold open access is the knowledge economy equivalent of saying: "We will build a high-speed rail network across the country but only use the existing horse and cart owners to provide services"; it simply reproduces the model of commercial print journals in another medium." "A true investment in openness as a defining principle of the advancement of knowledge requires us to think in a completely different way about a new Enlightenment, illuminated by the possibilities of digital technology, rather than reinscribing the rights of vested interests."

Peter Coles (Head of Sussex University's School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences) blogging in a personal capacity comments on the RCUK policy, and on what could/should be done with the block grant. Excerpts: "Yesterday I was informed of the allocation of funds for Open Access to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex arising from these block grants. The cash sum involved is too small to pay for Gold Open Access for more than a handful of papers produced within the School, so difficult decisions would have to be made about who is allowed to pay the Author Processing Charges if this pot of money is used in the way RCUK envisages." and "Even if I could force myself to grit my teeth and agree to fork out out the money in APCs to the Academic Publishing Racketeers, I can't think of any sensible basis for deciding which papers should be published this way and which shouldn't. In any case, at least in particle physics and astronomy, most papers are compliant with the RCUK policy anyway because they are placed on the arXiv. I therefore propose not to pay out a single penny of the RCUK OA funds for Gold Open Access, but simply to donate the entire sum as a contribution to the running costs of the arXiv."

Abstract of the Abstract of this research paper:  This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green Open Access (OA). It synthesises previous studies of green OA and covers issues of publishers rights, long-term preservation and the technical foundation for green OA. It concludes that the number of articles within the scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the selfarchival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.

In 2012 over 80,000 articles were published by OASPA members under CC-BY licenses, more than double the number in 2010.

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.

Paul Jump writes in the 14 March THE about the continuing confusion as to the meaning RCUK's revised open-access guidance, indicating that the publishers remain unhappy. Stevan Harnad, Charles Oppenheim, and Mike Taylor are three of the four commenters.

Google's VP of Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector applauds the Obama Administration's directive to the > $100m federal research funders to require Green OA on outputs from work they fund.

Summative and optimistic overview from Tony Hey (now with Microsoft, but previously a key player in Jisc and an academic at the University of Southampton), singling out Stevan Harnad for special praise, and pointing forward to the may 2013 meeting of the Global Research Council: "The second summit meeting of the GRC will take place in Berlin from 27 to 29 May 2013, hosted by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Brazilian CNPq agency. The main goal of this summit will be to 'agree on an action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications as the main paradigm of scientific communication in the following years'. Such unanimity on Open Access between the major global research funding organizations will surely bring about both a more sustainable model of scholarly communication and a more efficient research process for solving some of the major scientific challenges facing the world."

Suber highlights the many misconceptions about Gold OA and APCs. Excerpt: "The survey definition of gold OA leaves two false and harmful impressions: first that all (or even most) OA journals charge APCs, and second, that all (or even most) APCs are paid by authors. But most OA journals charge no APCs, and most authors even at those APC-charging journals don't pay them. In fact, only 3.7% of authors who publish in OA journals overall (12% of 31%) pay APCs. I've been complaining since 2006 about interviews and surveys that misinform their subjects, on just this point, before questioning them. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4391309 In my book (Open Access, MIT Press, 2012, p. 140) I put it this way: "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: 'At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.'" http://bit.ly/oa-book "