Group items tagged

The session starts at 11.40 and lasts for just under 1 hour. In his introduction, the Chair John Krebs says "We are not here to question the whole Open Access agenda. We take that as a given. We are not questioning the recommendations of the report. We are very much focused on the current plans for implementation and on the concerns that have been raised with us by various stake-holders which allude to in your written evidence." During the session 4 or 5 peers spoke in addition to Krebs - Rees, Sharpe, Broers, and Winston. All seemed variously well informed, not least Rees who looks to be aware of the concerns of Humanities and Social Sciences societies. Finch gave a confident and calm account of herself and in some ways this 1 hour session in which the ideas of a clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced person are developed under questioning by other clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced people. The full session on 29 January (when RCUK, HEFCE, and David Willetts will give evidence) will be interesting.

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.

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]

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 of 'field report' in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog : "The Open Library of Humanities is a newly-launched project aiming to provide an ethically sound and sustainable open access model for humanities research. By coordinating the discussion and implementation of a community-grounded approach to academic publishing, OLH aims to create an outlet better able to serve academics, libraries, and the wider research community. Co-founder Martin Eve describes the current "ideas phase" of the project and outlines his vision of where it will go from here."

Key points: * OASPA recognizes the interests of funders in seeking to maximize access to the results of research funded under their programmes. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy support for gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee. * The APC levels per article that are assumed by the RCUK policy following the Report by the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, are reasonable and in line with the experiences of open access publishers. * Infrastructural challenges exist (e.g. payment mechanisms), and are being addressed by the necessary stakeholders. OASPA is committed to engaging actively with stakeholders to resolve these.

One interesting conclusion from the PEER project: "The author deposit rate in the PEER Project was exceptionally low. This unwillingness to deposit, even when the author explicitly is invited by the publisher, suggests that author selfarchiving will not generate a critical mass of Green OA content."

Extract. Applicable across all fields: "The project leader must guarantee that the research findings are accessible to everyone (Open Access) within six months of publication. In cases where publishing involves parallel publication in open institutional archives, arrangements should be made at the time of publication for open accessibility within six months. The Council may prolong the allowed time period until Open Access or parallel publishing up to 12 months, provided that the project leader can present a clear documentation stating that all possible effort has been made to reach the six-month limit. Until further notice, the Open Access rules apply only to peer-reviewed texts in journals and conference reports, not to monographs and book chapters."

"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."

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."

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."'

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.