[GOAL] Re: The UK Gold Rush: "A Hand-Out from the BritishGovernment"

[Frederick Friend]

My thanks to Steve for this very revealing post, which to my mind only 
confirms what a shambles the whole process has been since the formation of 
the Finch Group through to the swift announcement of the policy and the lack 
of attention to implementation. I am inclined to think that the whole 
process was driven by a wish to avoid destabilising the publishing system 
because the message I heard from BIS civil servants and from the big 
international publishers at many meetings over the past ten years or so was 
of the risk to publishers of the green route to OA. In Finch the proponents 
of that view had their day and we are now living with the consequences.

I take seriously Steve's point that we need to tread carefully in case the 
UK Government decides not to risk any further support for OA of any colour. 
There are those participating in this process who will be quite happy to see 
open access disappear completely off the policy agenda and allow the current 
high expenditure on big licensing deals to continue unchecked. Those of us 
who see a mixed green and gold economy as the way forward need to work with 
people in institutions and with some members of the Finch Group to ensure 
that abandoning OA is not the outcome from the shambles. We also need a 
positive programme for repository development to put forward to offer a real 
alternative to current UK Government policy. We need to demonstrate that 
such developments would not destabilise the UK publishing industry and we 
need to work with OA-committed publishers in that process. In any scenario 
there will be publishers who will gain and other publishers who will lose 
from either gold or green OA but that need not lead to the destabilisation 
of the whole industry.

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk

-----Original Message----- 
From: Steve Hitchcock
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 5:01 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: The UK Gold Rush: "A Hand-Out from the 
BritishGovernment"

The Jump THE article was revealing, as was the recent ACSS meeting on 
Implementing Finch, judging from the reports from the DisorderofThings blog 
(http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/12/04/open-access-news-and-reflections-from-the-acss-conference/) 
and the presentations that are beginning to emerge on the official ACSS site 
for that meeting 
http://www.acss.org.uk/docs/Open%20Access%20event%20Nov%202012/OAWorkshop.htm.

Specifically on Fred's point about responses to questions about the policy, 
DisorderofThings says:

"what I mainly learned was that no one was really prepared to take any real 
responsibility for a policy to which a lot of eminent and well-informed 
people had very serious objections. Finch insisted that she had to stick to 
a brief which did not involve ‘destabilising’ the publishing system. No one 
was there to answer from either BIS or RCUK, who both adopted the policy 
immediately upon the publication of the report in July. HEFCE, who have not 
formally announced a position yet, however indicated at the conference that 
they are very likely to adopt the RCUK model for REF2020."

"One of the most curious things about this policy which emerged throughout 
the day is that it is ostensibly now ‘orphaned’ by its commissioners and 
designers – the Department for Business, Industry and Skills, and the Finch 
Working Group. ‘Implementation’ throughout this process has apparently been 
treated entirely separately to the actual policy itself. Finch herself 
clearly repudiated any responsibility for the outcomes of the policy, 
arguing that this is now something for institutions and researchers to 
negotiate, and insisting that the report recommended a ‘mixed economy’ 
between ‘green’ and ‘gold’.

"I say ‘apparently’, since it is clear that the Working Group clearly did 
not wash their hands of the consequences of the policy when it was relevant 
to the policy that they chose – they formed views about what they understood 
as the sustainability of the publishing industry, of journals and of learned 
societies, and dismissed options that in the implementation in their view 
would have had negative consequences. Similarly, they argue that they did 
not have a mandate to ‘destabilise’ the system.

"However, as commented by one audience member, much of the report itself 
seemed to be based on speculation rather than evidence from comparator 
countries with different policies. Moreover, it is clear that from the 
perspectives of scholarly authors however, the proposed ‘pay-to-say’ system 
may be highly destabilising, compromising academic freedom, draining tight 
research budgets and excluding a wide number of scholars from publishing. 
These huge issues are however nowhere discussed in the Finch Report, and 
have not made an impact on the direction of Government policy either. They 
were raised repeatedly by a number of the speakers and audience members at 
the conference, but there was no one there who would answer for these 
specific problems."

You can judge for yourself the degree to which this is reporting or opinion, 
but the THE suggests a possible retreat that is not good for OA in the UK, 
whether you are for this particular policy approach or not. Noting that all 
involved are in it together in wanting open access, we currently inhabit a 
murky area between an imbalanced, expensive and possibly unsustainable 
policy that could antagonise researchers, and a policy retreat that would 
leave little to build on with academic policy makers scarred by this 
process. We need to tread carefully.

Steve

On 6 Dec 2012, at 15:32, Frederick Friend wrote:

> Stevan summarises the current situation on UK OA policy very well. It is 
> surprising after almost six months of criticism of the Finch Report that 
> there has been so little defence of the Finch/RCUK/BIS position and (to my 
> knowledge) no response to the criticism voiced. Of all the parties 
> involved, RCUK have been the most communicative in defending their policy, 
> although largely repeating the Finch Group’s position. I have only seen 
> one e-mail from one member of the Finch Group (Martin Hall of Salford 
> University) explaining his personal position. There has been no response 
> at all from HM Government, although BIS civil servants must be monitoring 
> the blogs and lists and the articles by Paul Jump in “Times Higher 
> Education”. I myself have addressed three e-mails to Rt Hon David Willetts 
> MP through a message system on the BIS web-site for those taxpayers who 
> “want to get in touch with a BIS Minister”, receiving no reply to any of 
> the three messages within the 15 working days promised. He is a busy man, 
> no doubt, but the failure of BIS civil servants to send even an 
> acknowledgement illustrates the determination of UK Government to ignore 
> any criticism.
>
> Equally surprising is the lack of any dialogue with journal publishers. 
> Are not those smaller OA publishers who must have been hoping that the UK 
> Government policy would give them a bigger share of public expenditure on 
> academic journals not wondering whether the goldmine is a mirage? We 
> rarely hear anything to do with business models from the big international 
> STM publishers. Are they feeling secure in the knowledge that libraries 
> will continue to pay high prices for big licensing deals even if 
> insufficient money is available to pay for all APCs?
>
> One of the benefits from OA to research publication is that OA enables a 
> broader dialogue on the outcomes from academic research than is possible 
> in a toll-access publication system, enabling other researchers to comment 
> on published research and taxpayers to see the results from the research 
> they have funded. It is sad that no such dialogue appears to be allowed on 
> the policy to implement OA in the UK.
>
> Fred Friend
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
> http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk
>
>
> From: Stevan Harnad
> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 3:17 AM
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum ; Lib Serials list
> Subject: [GOAL] The UK Gold Rush: "A Hand-Out from the British Government"
>
> Re: "Finch access plan unlikely to fly across the Atlantic"
> (Times Higher Education, 6 December 2012)
> It's not just the US and the Social Sciences that will not join the UK's 
> Gold Rush. Neither will Europe, nor Australia, nor the developing world.
>
> The reason is simple: The Finch/RCUK/BIS policy was not thought through. 
> It was hastily and carelessly cobbled together without proper 
> representation from the most important stake-holders: researchers and 
> their institutions, the providers of the research to which access is to be 
> opened.
>
> Instead, Finch/RCUK/BIS heeded the lobbying from the UK's sizeable 
> research publishing industry, including both subscription publishers and 
> Gold OA publishers, as well as from a private biomedical research funder 
> that was rather too sure of its own OA strategy (even though that strategy 
> has not so far been very successful). BIS was also rather simplistic about 
> the "industrial applications" potential of its 6% of world research 
> output, not realizing that unilateral OA from one country is of limited 
> usefulness, and a globally scaleable OA policy requires some global 
> thinking and consultation.
>
> Now it will indeed amount to "a handout from the British government" -- a 
> lot of money in exchange for very little OA -- unless (as I still 
> fervently hope) RCUK has the wisdom and character to fix its OA mandate as 
> it has by now been repeatedly urged from all sides to do, instead of just 
> digging in to a doomed policy:
>
> Adopt an effective mechanism to ensure compliance with the mandate to 
> self-archive in UK institutional repositories (Green OA), in collaboration 
> with UK institutions. And scale down the Gold OA to just the affordable 
> minimum for which there is a genuine demand, instead of trying to force it 
> down the throats of all UK researchers in place of cost-free 
> self-archiving: The UK institutional repositories are already there: 
> ready, waiting -- and empty.
>
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