Harnad, Stevan (2013) Worldwide open access: UK
leadership? UKSG
Insights, 26, (1), Winter Issue, 14-21.
Abstract:
The web is destined to
become humankind's cognitive commons, where digital knowledge is jointly
created and freely shared. The UK has been a leader in the global movement
toward open access (OA) to research but recently its leadership has been
derailed by the joint influence of the publishing industry lobby from without
and well-intentioned but premature and unhelpful over-reaching from within the
OA movement itself. The result has been the extremely counterproductive ‘Finch
Report’ followed by a new draft of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) OA mandate,
downgrading the role of cost-free OA self-archiving of research publications
(‘green OA’) in favor of paying subscription publishers over and above
subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, in exchange for making single
articles OA (‘hybrid gold OA’). The motivation of the new policy is to reform
publication and to gain certain re-use rights (CC-BY), but the likely effect
would be researcher resistance, very little OA and a waste of research funds.
There is still time to fix the RCUK mandate and restore the UK's leadership by
taking a few very specific steps to clarify and strengthen the green component
by adding a mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliance, with
consequences for non-compliance, along lines also being adopted in the EC and the
US.
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