<div dir="ltr"><div>My, what a lot of (pessimistic) speculation based on a UK survey of bioscientists’ attitudes after the RCUK policy was announced and before the new HEFCE/REF policy was announced!<br></div><div><br></div><div>I’d suggest that the speculation about which (and how many) of their journal articles UK authors are likely to deposit at acceptance time across the upcoming six years — to ensure that they will be potentially eligible for REF2020 — may be particularly unperspicacious.</div><div><br></div><div>Lots of conjectures about RCUK mandate compliance, but no apparent mention of the complementary university mandates that are increasingly being adopted (and especially about the HEFCE-style Liege model: immediate deposit required in order to be visible for annual performance review). Those <i>cover all research output, funded and unfunded</i>. And Liege is reporting near 90% compliance…</div><div><br></div><div>Some apparent unawareness of how simple it already is to deposit.</div><div><br></div><div>And still way too much talk about (Gold) OA publishing as if that were what was meant by OA, and what this is all about.</div><div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Richard Poynder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:richard.poynder@gmail.com" target="_blank">richard.poynder@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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). </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">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.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt">The interview with Dagmara Weckowska can be reader here:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><a href="http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.html" target="_blank">http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.html</a></p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div style="font-family:'trebuchet ms',sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,255)"></div></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<p></p>
-- <br>
-- <br>
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google<br>
Groups "SPARC OA Forum" group.<br>
To post to this group, send email to <a href="mailto:sparc-oaforum@arl.org" target="_blank">sparc-oaforum@arl.org</a><br>
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to<br>
<a href="mailto:sparc-oaforum%2Bunsubscribe@arl.org" target="_blank">sparc-oaforum+unsubscribe@arl.org</a><br>
For more options, visit this group at<br>
<a href="http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum" target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum</a><br>
<br>
<p></p>
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to <a href="mailto:sparc-oaforum+unsubscribe@arl.org" target="_blank">sparc-oaforum+unsubscribe@arl.org</a>.<br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><br></div></div>