[GOAL] County Councils Can Help Persuade UK to Mandate Green OA

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2013-02-04, at 4:43 AM, [name not posted] wrote:

> Dear Professor Harnad
>  
> Your name has been suggested to me by member of the
> RadStats network as someone who may be able to provide
> more information an open access information sources.
>  
> I work in a local authority research team and trying to access
> academic articles to build evidence to support commissioning
> of services has had me scratching my head for a while.
> We hold a subscription to the IDOX Information Service which fulfils
> our needs in terms of remaining up to date on new developments,
> but when it comes to accessing the full-text articles of articles
> older than a month, we are a bit stumped!
>  
> I’ve been in touch with our local universities’ libraries and they are
> keen to work closely with us and provide us with access to some
> of their resources or staff that can produce the type of work we require.
> Open access was mentioned, but there doesn’t seem to be a definitive
> source of information (there may not be!) but I was wondering if you
> could provide me with some general pointers in order to find freely
> available academic and published research to help us with our work.
>  
> Please feel free to contact me for more information or to discuss further.

Providing Open Access (OA) means making academic articles free for all online, 
The University of Leicester has a mandate (requirement) that all of its published 
articles are made OA by self-archiving  them in the University's institutional 
repository, Leicester Research Archive (LRA). Leicester also has an
 Open Educational Resources Archive. DeMontfort University also has a repository,
 DORA, but no self-archiving mandate.

If you want access to all UK research output, your County Council and others should
singly and jointly urge both the UK universities (local and national) and the BIS and 
Research Councils UK, to mandate that all UK research output is self-archived. 
(This is also called "Green OA" -- to distinguish it from "Gold OA", which is much more costly, 
because it requires publishing in a journal that charges the author a fee for making the article OA.)

You have a strong case for insisting that OA is mandated. It is your taxes that fund research 
(and universities), as well as their subscriptions to journals. Journal subscriptions only allow 
access for University users, yet (worldwide) subscriptions are paying the full cost of publication 
many times over.

Hence all researchers ought to be required to do Green OA self-archiving of all of their 
research output. This is happening worldwide, but it needs to be accelerated, and I urge you
 to help accelerate it by mobilizing to insist BIS and RCUK and Universities all mandate it.

Stevan Harnad



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