From Nature News

From April 2013, science papers must be made free to access within six months of publication if they come from work paid for by one of the United Kingdom’s seven government-funded grant agencies, the research councils, which together spend about £2.8 billion (US$4.4 billion) each year on research.

The policy, announced this morning by the agencies’ umbrella body Research Councils UK (RCUK), makes clear that researchers should shun science journals that don’t allow authors to follow this mandate.

Also this morning, the UK government formally welcomed the Finch report into open access (which it had commissioned). Its response makes clear that RCUK’s new policy is the driving force for change.

RCUK hasn’t said how it will sanction those who don’t comply. (Astrid Wissenberg, who chairs the RCUK Impact Group, tells Nature that it will be looking to push to “75% compliance over a number of years”). But if it does rigorously enforce the policy, that will mark a dramatic shift for scientists, publishers and universities — perhaps the most significant change on the ground since Britain’s science minister David Willetts began discussing how to improve access to research papers more than a year ago.

Open ambition

RCUK released a draft version of the policy in March, and the final version makes no important changes, as the agencies had received mostly supportive comments, says an RCUK spokesperson. In essence, it is similar to announcements from the UK’s Wellcome Trust, a major biomedical research charity. But the research councils’ move will be more influential, as Wellcome spends only £600 million each year. Work funded in part by the research councils counts, so the policy includes overseas researchers collaborating with British scientists.

The research councils have said since 2006 that they want research to made free as soon as possible after publication. The difference today is that they are firmly stating the six-month maximum delay and, most importantly, are announcing how they will take money out of research grants to pay for open access.

Science journals have two ways of complying with the policy. They can allow the final peer-reviewed version of a paper to be put into an online repository within six months. Alternatively, publishers may charge authors to make research papers open-access up front.

In the United Kingdom in 2010, authors paid for immediate open-access publication for some 5% of papers (known as ‘gold’ open access), and another 35% were put into repositories after first being behind a paywall (‘green’ open access) — except that some of those were not the final peer-reviewed version of the paper. (The proportions also vary between disciplines, as you can see from this chart.)

For ‘gold’ open access, RCUK will pay institutions an annual block grant to support the charges. If government doesn’t give RCUK any more cash, the money required will come from existing grant funding; it’s been previously estimated at some 1–1.5% of research budgets. In turn, RCUK expects that institutions will set up and manage their own publication funds. That might mean that universities and researchers will begin to discuss where they can afford to publish.

2 Comments

1. 1. StevanHarnad 05:29 PM 7/16/12

   FINCH FIASCO IN FIGURES
   
   The Finch Report, under strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby, instead of recommending extending and optimizing the UK's worldwide lead in providing Green OA, cost-free, through institutional and funder self-archiving mandates, has recommended abandoning Green OA and Green OA mandates and instead spending extra money (£50-60 million yearly) on paying publishers' Gold OA fees as well as a UK blanket national site-license fee to cover whatever is not yet Gold OA (i.e., all the journals that UK institutions currently subscribe to, rather like the "Big Deals" publishers have been successfully negotiating with individual institutions and consortia):
   
   FINCH ON GREEN: "The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories… [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]…"
   
   FINCH ON GOLD: "Gold" open access, funded by article charges, should be seen as "the main vehicle for the publication of research"… Public funders should establish "more effective and flexible arrangements" to pay [Gold OA] article charges… During the transition to [Gold] open access, funding should be found to extend licences [subscriptions] for non-open-access content to the whole UK higher education and health sectors…
   Now here are some of the actual figures behind the above assertions. Let readers come to their own conclusions about the relative success, cost, benefits, cost-effectiveness, growth potential and timetable of mandating Green OA vs funding Gold OA
   http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/905-.html
   
   Harnad, Stevan (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/341128/
   

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

2. 2. StevanHarnad 08:40 AM 7/30/12

   HYBRID GOLD AND THE CHESHIRE CAT'S GRIN
   
   Suppose you're a subscription journal publisher. Adding a Hybrid (Subscription/Gold) Open Access (OA) option means you keep selling subscriptions as before, but - on top of that - you charge (whatever you like) as an extra fee for selling Gold OA, per single article, to any author who agrees to pay extra for it.
   
   How much do you charge? Up to you. For example, if you publish 100 articles per year and your total annual revenue is $X, you can charge 1% of $X for hybrid Gold OA per article.
   
   And now in the UK -- thanks to the Finch committee recommendations and the revised RCUK OA policy - if the UK provides 6% of the world's research articles yearly, then on average 6% of the articles in any journal will be fee-based hybrid Gold OA. Hence worldwide publisher revenue - let's say it's $XXX per year - will increase from $XXX per year to: $XXX + 6% per year
   
   Publishers are not too dense to do this arithmetic. They've already done it. That's what hybrid Gold is predicated upon. And that's why publishers are so pleased with Finch/RCUK: "The world purports to want OA. Fine. We're ready to sell it to them -- on top of what we're selling them already."
   
   In the UK, Finch and RCUK have obligingly eliminated hybrid Gold OA's only real competition (Green OA) - Finch by ignoring it completely, and RCUK by forcing fundees to pay for Gold - rather than to provide cost-free Green - whenever the publisher has the sense to offer hybrid Gold.
   
   Of course, publishers will say (and sometimes even mean it) that they aren't really trying to inflate their already ample income even further. As the uptake of hybrid Gold increases, they'll proportionately lower the cost of subscriptions - till subscriptions are gone, and all that's left, like the Cheshire Cat's grin, is Gold OA revenue (now no longer hybrid but "pure") - and at the same bloated levels as today's subscriptions.
   
   So what? The goal, after all, was always OA, not Green OA or Gold OA or saving money on subscriptions. Who cares if all that money is being wasted?
   
   What matters is the global OA growth and precious time that will continue to be wasted as the joint thrall of Gold Fever and Rights Rapture keep the research community from mandating the cost-free Green OA that would bring them 100% OA globally in next to no time, and leave them instead chasing along the CC-BYways after gold dust year upon year, at unaffordable, unnecessary and unscalable extra cost.
   
   Let's hope that RCUK will have the sense and integrity to recognize its mistake and correct it.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this