With New REF Mandate Proposal, UK Rejoins OA Vanguard

HEFCE's post REF-2014 Open Access proposal looks very promising, if I have understood it correctly.

The proposal is to mandate that in order to be eligible,
all peer-reviewed journal articles submitted to REF after 2014
must be deposited in the author's institutional repository
immediately upon acceptance for publication,
regardless of whether the article is published in a subscription journal or in a Gold OA journal
(no preference, and no restriction on author's journal choice),
and regardless of whether the publisher embargoes Open Access to the deposit
(for an allowable embargo period that remains to be decided.)

The proposed HEFCE REF OA policy looks much better than the current RCUK OA policy. Let us hope that the RCUK policy will now be brought into line with the proposed HEFCE REF policy.

It is also very reassuring to hear that the policy will be based on collaboration and consultation.

This may help the UK regain its former worldwide leadership position in OA. The new US policy developments (following, a decade later, in the UK's pioneering footsteps) are extremely welcome and timely, but they still have many rough edges. Let's hope it will be the UK that again shows how to smooth them out and propel us all unstoppably to global OA.

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Readers may find it amusing to look at this 2003 proposal to RAE:

"Being the only country with a national research assessment exercise [1], the UK is today in a unique position to make a small change that will confer some large benefits. The Funding Councils should mandate that in order to be eligible for Research Assessment and funding, all UK research-active university staff must maintain (I) a standardised online RAE-CV, including all designated RAE performance indicators, chief among them being (II) the full text of every refereed research paper, publicly self-archived in the university's online Eprint Archive and linked to the CV for online harvesting, scientometric analysis and assessment. This will (i) give the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) far richer, more sensitive and more predictive measures of research productivity and impact, for far less cost and effort (both to the RAE and to the universities preparing their RAE submissions), (ii) increase the uptake and impact of UK research output, by increasing its visibility, accessibility and usage, and (iii) set an example for the rest of the world that will almost certainly be emulated, in both respects: research assessment and research access."

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier.Ariadne 35.