[GOAL] Re: Clarification of the new OA policy from the RCUK

[Reckling, Falk, Dr.]

I think the new OA Policy of the RCUK is a pragmatic one and could be a role model for others outside the UK because it reflects and supports the vital development on the Gold OA publication market (beyond PLoS and BMC think of PeerJ, IZA journals, Forum of Mathematics, eLife, OAPEN, SCOAP3, eEconomics, F1000 Research ...)



The point I would add is not only to fund APCs but also business models where not authors but research institutions or other institutions cover the costs. That works quite well for some very prestigious OA journals as Journal of Economic Perspectives, Computational Linguistics, Journal of Machine Learning, Theoretical Economics ... )

That could could also help to have more competition on innovation, quality and prices on the publication market.



Falk Reckling

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Von: goal-bounces at eprints.org [goal-bounces at eprints.org]" im Auftrag von "Stevan Harnad [amsciforum at gmail.com]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 23. August 2012 17:24
An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum; BOAI Forum
Betreff: [GOAL] Re: Clarification of the new OA policy from the RCUK

Mark Thorley's response is very disappointing:

-- MT: "the ‘corrections’ [Harnad] proposes would dilute our policy so that it was no longer able to deliver the level of open access which the Research Councils require."
http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2012/08/10/the-benefits-of-open-access/#comment-81

The proposed corrections very explicitly *include* a correction to "the level of open access the Research Councils require."

To reply that this "level" is incorrigible and nonnegotiable is tantamount to saying our minds are made up, don't trouble us with further information.

The points requiring correction are very specifically those concerning the "level of open access" (Gratis or Libre; immediate or embargoed) that is actually needed by UK researchers today, and at what price, both in terms of price paid, out of scarce research funds, and, far more important, in terms of Green OA lost, in the UK as well as in the rest of the world (to whose research, RCUK needs to remind itself, UK researchers require open access too).

These matters are not resolved by asserting that Finch/RCUK has already made up its mind a-priori about the level of OA required.

-- MT: "We not only want research papers to be ‘free to read’ but also to be ‘free to exploit’ – not only for text and data mining to advance scholarship… but also to drive innovation in the scholarly communications market itself."

All OA advocates are in favour of text-minability, innovation potential, and as much CC-BY as each author needs and wants for their research output, over and above free online access to all research output -- but certainly not just for *some* research output, and certainly not at the expense (in both senses) of free online access to *all* research output (of which the UK only produces 6%). Yet it is precisely for the latter that Finch/RCUK are insisting upon restrictions and pre-emptive payment -- for UK research output, both at the local UK tax-payer's expense, and at the expense of global Green OA.

The RCUK/Finch policy provides a huge incentive to subscription publishers to offer paid hybrid Gold while at the same time increasing their Green embargoes to make cost-free Green an impermissible option for UK authors. This not only deprives UK authors of the cost-free Green option, but it deprives the rest of the world as well.

(I don't doubt that some of the members of the Finch committee may even have thought of this as a good thing: a way to induce the rest of the world to follow the UK model, whether or not they can afford it, or wish to. But is this not something that may require some further thought?)

-- MT: "And, we are very clear that those who read research papers come from a much wider base than the research community that Harnad considers will be satisfied through the use of repositories and green OA. Therefore, there are no plans to revise the RCUK policy, just to satisfy the interests of one particular sector of the OA community."

It seems to me Mark has it exactly backwards. The "wider base," in all scientific and scholarly research fields, worldwide, wants and needs free online access, now, and urgently, to all research, in all fields (not just UK research output). It is only in a few particular subfields that there is an immediate and urgent need for further re-use rights (and even there, not just for UK's 6%).

How urgent is text-mining of the UK's 6% of world research output and CC-BY, compared to free online access to all of the world's research output?

And what are these urgent text-mining and other Libre OA functions? All authors need and want their work to be accessible to all its intended users, but how many authors need, want or even know about Libre OA, or CC-BY?

And, Mark, can you elaborate rather specifically on the urgent "innovation market potential" that will resonate with all or most researchers as a rationale for constraining their journal choice, diminishing their research funds, and possibly having to find other funds in order to publish at all, today, when they do not even have free online access to the research output of the 94% of the world not bound by the RCUK policy?

Stevan Harnad