Open Access Archivangelism

"UK Government invests £10 million to help universities move to open access"

At first, UK researchers will applaud: "More money for us [sort of]! Hurrah!"

Then they will think: "But that money could have been spent on funding more research, of which there is already too little to go round -- and it's probably being taken from the same pot..."

And then they will realize that:

- they are being pushed toward journals they don't necessarily want to publish in,

- forced to pay for an OA that they could have had with just a few gratis Green keystrokes,

- forced to reach into their grants (or pockets!) when the 10M pounds run out,

(since the UK, although it produces only 6% of the articles published annually worldwide, produces a lot more than what £10M will pay for at (say) £1K per paper for Gold OA publishing fees: do the arithmetic, even assuming that the world publishes only a million refereed research journal papers per year, and then see how far £10M takes you for the UK's 60K papers at £1K for Gold OA fees per paper: a six-fold shortfall)

- and that not only is the UK gaining no more OA to the other 94% of research from the rest of the world, to which UK researchers need OA,

- but that the UK's shift from mandating cost-free Green OA self-archiving to paying publishers extra for pricey Gold OA to UK research alone

is actually making it harder for the rest of the world to mandate and provide the reciprocal cost-free Green OA that everyone needs...

The BIS's largesse would just be another case of (mostly) wasted public funds (a bigger problem, which is not our main concern here) if it weren't coupled with the completely gratuitous and self-injurious undermining of a virtually cost-free means of achieving the same local end -- and also achieving far more, globally, in an affordable, scaleable and sustainable way.

But all of this would be fixed, if one 9-word clause were expunged from the new RCUK OA policy: the one forcing researchers to choose Gold over Green. For then this BIS largesse would just be a hand-out to pay for Gold OA (voluntarily) for 10K UK research papers: 1/6th of the UK's annual research output.

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Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer

Harnad, S (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issue

Harnad, S (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network.

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012 [in press: not yet available]

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Harnad, S (2102) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

[Still a lot of implementation details to shore up, but this simple tweak will fix the new RCUK mandates's fatal flaw.]

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3. Research Council Expectations of Researchers

The Research Councils expect authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free.

Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access (see section 4).

2. must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials – such as data, samples or models – can be accessed.

4. Compliance of Journals

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

2. Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. In this option no ‘Article Processing Charge’ will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.