Self-Archiving Mandates

One could hardly have hoped for a better outcome from the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee's Report. If BIS's recommendations are followed then the UK will regain its global leadership role in the Open Access movement -- the role the UK has been playing ever since the pioneering Report in 2004 by Ian Gibson's Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology. That Report had recommended that UK's universities and funding councils should mandate Green OA self-archiving of all peer-reviewed research articles. In the ensuing years more and more of the rest of the world began to follow suit.

The 2013 BIS Report (I, II) now recommends mandating;

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

The BIS recommendations now perfectly complement HEFCE's recommendation (as well as those of BOAI-10: 1.6) to make immediate-deposit a condition for eligibility for REF 2020 (thereby effectively recruiting universities to serve as the mechanism for ensuring timely compliance, following the highly successful mandate model of the University of Li�ge). This effectively fixes the flaws in the Finch Report. The UK's OA policy will now also be compatible with OA policies in the EU, the US and the rest of the world, doing them all one better with its explicit call for immediate institutional deposit and effective compliance monitoring.

Business, Innovation and Skills Committee Select Committee
Announcement No.21
Monday 9 September 2013

NEW REPORT: Open Access: achieving a functional market
Under strict embargo until 00.01 BST on Tuesday 10 September

Government mistaken in focusing on Gold as route to full open access, says Committee

The Government�s commitment to increasing access to published research findings, and its desire to achieve full open access, are welcome, says the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee in a Report published today. However, whilst Gold open access is a desirable ultimate goal, focusing on it during the transition to a fully open access world is a mistake, says the Report.

The Report calls on the Government and RCUK to reconsider their preference for Gold open access during the five year transition period, and give due regard to the evidence of the vital role that Green open access and repositories have to play as the UK moves towards full open access.

The Report recommends that:

� the Government should take an active role in promoting standardisation and compliance across subject and institutional repositories [paragraph 25].

� RCUK should reinstate and strengthen the immediate deposit mandate in its original policy and improve the monitoring and enforcement of mandated deposit [paragraph 31].

� the Government and RCUK should revise their policies to place an upper limit of 6 month embargoes on STEM subject research and up to 12 month embargoes for HASS subject research [paragraph 50].

� the Government should mitigate against the impact on universities of paying Article Processing Charges out of their own reserves [paragraph 64].

� if the preference for Gold is maintained, the Government and RCUK should amend their policies so that APCs are only paid to publishers of pure Gold rather than hybrid journals to eliminate the risk of double-dipping [paragraph 77].