World OA Policy Sweepstakes: UK Retakes Commanding Lead

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SUMMARY: Bravo UK! Although we had rather hoped for a more concerted consensus from Research Councils UK (RCUK), nevertheless, with three out of the eight councils mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, one strongly encouraging it, and four not yet decided, that is still enough to restore the UK's commanding lead in worldwide OA Policy today.

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(1) The RCUK's decision today to let individual funding councils decide for themselves whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving is both good and bad.

It is good that the individual councils will be able to mandate it if they wish (and bravo to MRC, BBSRC & ESRC for already doing so: CCLRC is close, and I am sure other councils will be mandating too!), but too bad that consensus by all the councils could not be reached.

(2) The "plans to assess the impact of author-pays publishing and self-archiving on research publishing" are empty nonsense.

First, the most important impact of OA is on research, researchers, and the public that funds them, and that impact has already been tested and repeatedly demonstrated to be highly positive, with OA dramatically enhancing research usage and impact.

Second, the only objective way to assess the impact of mandated self-archiving on publishing is to mandate it and monitor the outcome yearly. So far, spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving remains at about 15% overall, and that's why OA needs to be mandated. So far spontaneous self-archiving has had zero impact on publishing (i.e., subscription revenues), even in the few fields (of physics) where it has been close to 100% for years.

In other words, the spontaneous self-archiving experiment has already been done, and it has had no impact on publishing. The only way to go on to assess the effects of mandated self-archiving is to mandate it, and review the effects each year.

As to testing the effects of OA publishing: Publishers are now offering Open Choice, whereby authors (and their institutions and funders) can decide whether or not they wish to pay for OA for their individual articles. That promises to be a lengthy experiment, and the decision on whether to mandate OA self-archiving now should certainly not wait for its outcome -- particularly because 100% of publication costs are currently being paid by institutional subscriptions, and it is not clear where or why to find extra cash for paid OA until and unless institutional subscriptions start getting cancelled (in which case the institutional cancellation savings themselves would be the natural source for the cash to pay for the OA publication).

In other words, this call for further studies to "assess impact" before mandating OA self-archiving is merely a cop-out in response to publishing community lobbying, which has already successfully filibustered self-archiving mandates for several years now: In reality, the self-archiving mandates themselves are the only objective test of their own impact.

Let us hope the other individual Research Councils will, like MRC, BBSRC and ESRC (CCLRC is already close) have the good sense to go ahead and conduct the tests, by adopting the mandates.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum