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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-GB link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>This, they believe, will be the outcome of the OA mandates from Research Councils UK (which came into effect on April 1<sup>st</sup> 2013) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (which will come into effect in 2016). <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>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.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'>The interview with Dagmara Weckowska can be reader here:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><a href="http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.html">http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>