[GOAL] Taking Publisher Policy Out of the Loop for HEFCE OA Policy

[Stevan Harnad]

Lee Jones<http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/08/16/hefce-the-ref-open-access-and-journals-in-politics-ir-and-political-theory/>
makes
some good points, but underestimates the power and purpose of some of the
very HEFCE policy points that he questions.

It is the fact that HEFCE proposes to mandate the immediate, unembargoed
deposit of the FAV (Final Author Version) in the author’s institutional
repository — even if access to the deposit is not made immediately OA —
that (1) restores authors’ freedom of journal choice, (2) protects authors
from having to pay Gold OA fees, (3) takes publishers out of the loop for
HEFCE OA Policy, and even (4) equips users to request and authors to
provide “Almost-OA” to embargoed deposits, via the institutional
repository’s eprint request Button <http://j.mp/oaBUTTON>, with one click
each.

In the UK, (a) institutional repository start-up costs are mostly already
bespoken, (b) repositories have multiple purposes, with OA only one of
them, and they (c) allow archiving costs to be distributed and local,
keeping them small, rather than big, like the costs of a national archive
like France’s HAL or a global one like Arxiv. Central locus of storage is
in any case an obsolete notion in the distributed digital network era.

*See:*

http://j.mp/HEFCEpolicy
http://j.mp/LOCUSofOA
http://j.mp/oaBUTTON
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