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UK Research Funders: Publicly Funded Research Must Be Publicly Available
scibri writes "The UK's research councils have put in place an open access policy similar to the one used by the US NIH. 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 UK's seven government-funded grant agencies, the research councils, which together spend about £2.8 billion each year on research (press release). The councils say authors should shun journals that don't allow such policies, though they haven't said how those who don't comply with the rules will be punished."
facilitate the process like they do with the NIH requirements. It's so much easier than dealing with a journal that does rather than one that doesn't.
This isn't actually a decision from the UK, but from Europe, and applies to all European countries. http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/12/790&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
One of the options they mention is to put the paper in an institutional repository (i.e. on a web server run by your university). Even Elsevier currently already allows you to put your final submission online yourself, so that shouldn't be a problem. This is not such a big step as it seems in that respect.
What I do very much like is the required use of the CC-BY licence if any processing fees are paid. To see why that is such a big deal, here's what e.g. Elsevier normally offers authors: 1) You write the paper, 2) we get a volunteer editor to look at it, 3) the volunteer editor gets some volunteer reviewers to review it, and you scientists go back and forth until the editor says that it's accepted, 4) you sign over your copyright to us, 5) we typeset it, 6) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays us for a subscription, and 7) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays a per-access fee. Recently, with all the Open Access discussion going on, they've added an option: 8) You pay a $3000 "handling fee" to cover our expenses, and we'll give access to anyone for free.
Note the catch: you the scientist do most of the work yourself, and pay the publisher for their part of the work, but the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work! That seems grossly unfair to me. In this new policy, the publisher may still own the copyright even if they get paid, but with a CC-BY licence, everyone else essentially gets the same rights they do, so it's toothless. That is a step in the right direction.
Yeah, it could, but if you read the Finch report, you'll find that they're recommending what's known as gold open access. Researchers will be expected to pay an preposterously high per-article fee during the publication process -- a fee that they will be expected to write into their proposal for funding. This means that shedloads of funding will be going from research groups to publishers. A 2,000 UKP per publication 'article processing fee' has been proposed, although with gloomy predictability, higher-profile publishers with better impact factors have generally made it known that their article processing costs, seeing as how they're Quality and all, may (alas) be somewhat higher. They can get away with it.
This, incidentally, means that people who happen to do research and receive public funding, but don't happen to have any project funding (and this is far from rare), are going to find it very difficult to afford to publish. We're going from a situation in which the general public can't afford to access/read research to a situation in which only a subsection of academics will be able to afford to publish, thus privileging themselves on the REF (latest incarnation of the research evaluation exercise) and denying the stragglers. Publishers are content with this because they're on the gravy train for life. Many academics aren't unduly concerned because they have project funding and it's just another system of fees. And hey, screw the riffraff, right? They can stay in the low impact factor ghetto where they belong.
Open access is a good idea. This, on the other hand, is just your typical everyday lunatic you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours moneywasting. The actual solution is within the government's reach (hint: it involves privileging legit open access journals in the REF, rather than paying wodges of cash to Nature), but that won't get anyone invited to any dinner-parties at all, so we'll just keep throwing money at publishers instead.
I'm in a situation right now where my own funder both mandates open access and refuses to pay for it, which, regrettably, is the sort of laughably schitzophrenic thinking I have come to expect from them. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'They're all a load of useless bloody loonies.'