Resources for Gold Open Access for Learned Societies

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."

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.

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."

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.

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]

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. "

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.

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.

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?"

Blog post by Peter Murray Rust examining the extent to which resetting and reformatting by publishers adds or removes value.

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."

Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toront writes about the "Big Deal" packages in publishing, drawing on "Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce" by Andrew Odlyzko - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2211874

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

A tersely expressed rationale for the "Green first, Gold next" approach. Excerpt: "...once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs -- and that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA. That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price)."

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.

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."

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.]