UK OA: TIME'S 'A WASTING
1. The House of Lords recommends
determining whether other countries are mandating gold OA or green OA.
(The finding will be that other countries
are mandating green, and not funding or preferring gold, as the RCUK has
proposed to do. The outcome will be that the UK mandates green and drops its
preference [and perhaps its funding] for gold, as it should have done in the
first place.)
2. The Lords also recommend looking into
discipline differences.
(The finding will be that all disciplines
want and need OA and that publishers differ in whether and how long an embargo
they want on green OA. The solution will be to mandate immediate, unembargoed
deposit of all peer-reviewed journal articles in institutional repositories,
but to allow an embargo of 6 months for making deposits in science, technology,
engineering and medical research OA and perhaps a somewhat longer embargo for
making arts, humanities and social science deposits OA. During the embargo, the
repositories will automatically facilitate authors' providing individual
emailed copies of the deposit to individual users for research purposes on
individual request.)
The Lords' data on current journal green
OA embargo lengths (Figure 3), focusing as it does on journal compliance with
RCUK paid gold and embargoed green policy, fails to show the most relevant
data: the proportion of journals already endorsing immediate, un-embargoed
green OA, which is over 60% and includes almost all the top journals in most
fields. The issue is not crucial, however, because an immediate-deposit mandate
moots any indecision about embargo lengths: the immediate-deposit component --
if not the embargo length -- is indeed one-size-fits-all.
The Lords' call for an examination of
whether and which disciplines want and need CC-BY licences for re-mix, re-use
and re-publication is welcome. (The finding will be that most if not all
disciplines don't need it, and certainly not as urgently as all disciplines
want and need free online access; hence CC-BY is no justification for
double-paying publishers gold OA.)
3. The only disappointment in the Lords'
report is the treatment of "compliance."
There are two independent aspects of
compliance: Journal compliance and author compliance. A policy mandating
immediate deposit with no preference for gold moots the major concerns about
journal compliance.
But "slow implementation" is
not the solution for ensuring author compliance with green (immediate
deposit).
This is the part of UK OA policy that
needs the most attention, but it is easily solved: Require institutional
deposit, thereby recruiting institutions to monitor and ensure immediate
deposit; make grant instalments and renewal contingent on compliance with the
immediate deposit-requirement (as many mandates worldwide are now doing); and
designate deposit as the sole route for submitting publications for performance
evaluation, research assessment and grant applications.
The remedies for the flaws in the
proposed new RCUK policy are simple and obvious, but they need to be attended
to promptly now, otherwise the UK will be the odd man out in the worldwide
movement toward OA, instead of the leader it had formerly been.
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 3:47 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder@btinternet.com>
wrote:
The House of
Lords Science & Technology Committee has today published its report on
implementation of the UK government’s Open Access policy.
Commenting,
Lord Krebs, Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee,
said:
“RCUK did not
consult or communicate effectively with key stakeholders in the publishing and
academic communities when implementing its open access policy. While we are
delighted that our inquiry has shown that RCUK are proposing to phase in their
open access policy during the initial five-year implementation phase, this
should have been made clear much earlier. That is why we call upon the
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to review how RCUK communicated
this important change.
“There are
still many unknowns concerning the impact of the open access policy, which is
why RCUK must commit to a wide rangeing review of its policy in 2014, 2016 and
before it expects full compliance in 2018. We heard significant concern about
the policy’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and are pleased that RCUK are both
aware of these concerns and prepared to act on them.
“Open access
is an inexorable trend. The Government must ensure that in further developing
our capabilities to share research they do not inadvertently damage the
‘complex ecosystem’ of research communication in the UK.”
The report is
available here: http://ow.ly/hWw0f
RCUK’s
response is here: http://ow.ly/hWwaE
Times Higher
news story here: http://ow.ly/hWxbT
A background
piece here: http://j.mp/11XPsoX
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK]
On Behalf Of CHARLES OPPENHEIM
Sent: 22 February 2013 09:46
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: House of Lords Sci/Tech C'tee's report on RCUK Open Access Policy published today!
Sent: 22 February 2013 09:46
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: House of Lords Sci/Tech C'tee's report on RCUK Open Access Policy published today!
Don't
have a URL for it, and have not yet read it, but rumour has it that it is
critical of RCUK's commitment to Gold
Charles
Professor
Charles Oppenheim
