Prior AmSci Topic Threads:
"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!"
"Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding"
Is the
ALPSP public announcement (reproduced from Peter Suber's
Open Access News at the end of this message) really true? Has ALPSP indeed been privately promised veto/embargo power over the
RCUK self-archiving policy?
I very much hope the ALPSP public announcement is not true, and that ALPSP is again merely overstating its case (
vastly), because otherwise it sounds as if RCUK has effectively agreed to make the RCUK policy conditional on whether and when each publisher agrees. If that were true it would mean that the RCUK self-archiving policy was even weaker than the deeply flawed
NIH policy (with its built-in 12-month embargo), indeed, that the RCUK policy was no policy, mandate or requirement at all, but merely a pointer to each publisher's policy.
The optimal RCUK policy would of course be:
Plan A: to mandate both (1) depositing the full text and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) setting full-text access as Open-Access immediately upon acceptance for publication.
But if RCUK feels for some reason it cannot mandate that at this time, the next best thing is certainly:
Plan B: to mandate (1) depositing the full text and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication and to also strongly recommend (2) setting full-text access as Open-Access immediately upon acceptance for publication. (If the author prefers, for articles in the <10% of journals that have not yet given OA self-archiving their blessing, full-text access can be temporarily set as Institution-Internal-Access, and external eprint requests to the author -- based on the immediate webwide visibility and accessibility of the OAI metadata -- can be made and filled by email for the time being.)
Plan B would immediately remove the RCUK policy from the reach of the ALPSP lobby completely, because only deposit would be mandated, whereas OA access-setting would merely be recommended. Nothing else would then need to be stipulated at all in the RCUK policy -- about publisher policy, copyright or embargoes.
To instead build into the RCUK policy a veto and embargo power at each publisher's discretion would be counterproductive in the extreme, not only for the RCUK policy's capacity to provide OA to British research output, but for its capacity to serve as a model for other nations the wrold over that are closely watching what RCUK will do, and likely to emulate it.
We need further public clarification on this from RCUK. Otherwise, if uncontested by RCUK, ALPSP's public statement (below) -- claiming to have already received RCUK's agreement to grant publishers veto and embargo power over whether and when the full-text deposit is made -- will cause negative ripples worldwide through rumour alone, giving the impression that there is in fact no RCUK self-archiving policy at all, but simply a deferral to whatever policy each publisher may or may not happen to have on the matter.
From Peter Suber's Open Access News
ALPSP meeting with the RCUK
On September 16, the ALPSP met with representatives of the RCUK to discuss publisher objections to the draft OA policy. The ALPSP has publicly disclosed this much about the results of the meeting:
"We are reassured that RCUK have agreed to explain to grant recipients why publishers might find it necessary to impose an embargo or time limit for deposit of articles in order to protect subscription and licence sales, and also to insist that such embargoes must be observed; we have offered to help with drafting the wording for this. We are also pleased to know that RCUK will be consulting publishers over the specification of the research which will be conducted over the next two years, to evaluate the likely effects of the policy (although papers arising from research funded after the beginning of 2006 are unlikely to have been published by the review date of 2008); we hope that the research will be sufficiently objective to ensure that publishers do provide data about the effects, if any, on downloads, subscription/licence sales, and other measures of journal sustainability. RCUK plan to hold a workshop for societies in the early part of next year, and ALPSP has offered to help in any way that might be required."
The ALPSP minutes of the meeting are available to members only. [Peter Suber: "It looks like the RCUK will not close the "copyright loophole" in the current draft, which allows publishers to impose embargoes. Instead, it may even let publishers re-word it to suit themselves."]
Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 09:14:00 AM.
Stevan Harnad
