[BOAI] The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex

[Richard Poynder]

As a result of prolonged pressure from the open access (OA) movement - and
following considerable controversy within the research community - the UK is
now embarked on a journey that OA advocates hope will lead to all
publicly-funded research produced in the country being made freely available
on the Internet. 

 

This, they believe, will be the outcome of the OA mandates from Research
Councils UK (which came into effect on April 1st 2013) and the Higher
Education Funding Council for England (which will come into effect in 2016).


 

It has taken the OA movement twelve years to get the UK to this point (the
Budapest Open Access Initiative was authored in 2002), but advocates believe
that these two mandates have now made open access a done deal in the
country. As such, they say, they represent a huge win for the movement.

 

Above all, they argue, HEFCE's insistence that only those works that have
been deposited in an open repository will be eligible for assessment for
REF2020 (which directly affects faculty tenure, promotion and funding) is a
requirement that no researcher can afford to ignore.

 

But could this be too optimistic a view? Dagmara Weckowska, a lecturer in
Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex, believes it may be.
While she does not doubt that the RCUK/HEFCE policies will increase the
number of research outputs made open access, she questions whether they will
be as effective as OA advocates appear to assume.

 

Weckowska reached this conclusion after doing some research earlier this
year into how researchers' attitudes to open access have changed as a result
of the RCUK policy. This, she says, suggests that open access mandates will
only be fully successful if researchers can be convinced of the benefits of
open access. As she puts it, "Researchers who currently provide OA only when
they are required to do so by their funders will need a change of heart and
mind to start providing open access to all their work."

 

In addition, she says: "Under the new HEFCE policy, researchers have
incentives to make their best 4 papers accessible through the gold or green
OA route (assuming that the REF again requires 4 papers) but they do not
have incentives to make ALL their papers openly accessible."

 

The interview with Dagmara Weckowska can be reader here:

 

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.htm
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