[BOAI] Tony Hey on Finch Report and RCUK’s Open Access Policy

[Stevan Harnad]

A Journey to Open Access – Part
4<http://tonyhey.net/2013/02/04/a-journey-to-open-access-part-4/>
Tony Hey on eScience <http://tonyhey.net/>

...A major problem with the Finch and RCUK endorsements of gold OA as the
preferred route to open access—and their explicit deprecation of green
OA—is that the proposed interim settlement is unreasonably generous to the
publishers at the expense of the UK Research Councils and HEFC-funded UK
universities. By giving publishers the choice of being paid for gold OA or
offering an unpaid green OA option, it is clear that publishers will cancel
their green option and opt to pick up more money by introducing a gold
option. Their shareholders would demand no less. Even the majority of OA
publishers who currently charge no APC fee—contrary to the assumptions of
the Finch Group—will be motivated to pick up the money on the table.
Similarly, publishers who now only offer Toll Access via subscriptions will
be quite happy to pick up more money by offering a gold OA option in
addition to their subscription charges....

...What should RCUK do now? In my opinion, RCUK could make a very small but
significant change in its open access policy and adopt a rights-retention
green OA mandate that requires ‘*RCUK-funded authors to retain certain
non-exclusive rights and use them to authorize green OA*’. In the words of
Peter Suber, this would ‘*create a standing green option regardless of what
publishers decide to offer on their own*.’ In addition, RCUK should
recommend that universities follow the Open Access Policy
Guidelines<http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/authors/policy_guide> of
Harvard, set out by their Office of Scholarly Communication. Under this
policy, Harvard authors are required to deposit a full text version of
their paper in DASH, the Harvard Open Access Repository even in the case
where the publisher does not permit open access and the author has been
unable to obtain a waiver from the publisher...
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