[BOAI] Finch Report, a Trojan Horse, Serves Publishing Industry Interests Instead of UK Research Interests

[Stevan Harnad]

** Cross-Posted **


1. The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to
protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of
research and the public that funds research:

http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf


2. The Finch Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act
(RWA) -- since discredited and withdrawn -- failed to do: to push "Green"
OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by
authors' funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate
and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer
review -- and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward
"Gold" OA publishing, at the publishers' pace and price.


3. The result would be very little OA, very slowly, and at a high Gold OA
price (38 million pounds), taken out of already scarce UK research funds,
instead of the rapid and cost-free OA growth vouchsafed by Green OA
mandates from funders and universities.


4. Both the resulting loss in UK's Green OA mandate momentum and the
expenditure of further funds to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA would be a
major historic (and economic) set-back for the UK, which has until now been
the worldwide leader in OA. The UK would, if the Finch Report were heeded,
be left behind by the EU (which has mandated Green OA for all research it
funds) and the US (which has a Bill in Congress to do the same -- the same
Bill that the recently withdrawn RWA Bill tried to counter).


5. The UK already has 40% Green OA -- twice as much as the rest of the
world. Rather than heeding the Finch Report, which has so obviously fallen
victim to the publishing lobby, the UK should shore up and extend its
cost-free Green OA funder and institutional mandates to make them more
effective and mutually reinforcing, so that UK Green OA can grow quickly to
100%.


6. Publishers will adapt. In the internet era, the research publishing tail
should not be permitted to wag the research dog, at the expense of the
access, usage, applications, impact and progress of the research in which
the UK tax-payer has invested so heavily, in increasingly hard economic
times. The benefits -- to research, researchers, their institutions, the
vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public -- of cost-free Green Open
Access to publicly funded research vastly outweigh the (natural) pressure
to adapt to the internet era that mandated Green OA will exert on the
publishing industry.


*Stevan Harnad*

*EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)* <ttp://www.openscholarship.org>
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