[GOAL] Re: The direction of travel for open access in the UK

[Leslie Carr]

Like Fred I found the whole event rather mystifying. The attitude to green OA by the publishers and societies is completely incompatible with their stated desire for time to adapt to the new OA realities.

If they really are looking for time to adapt (as opposed to a perpetual prevarication), then green affords them a suitable breathing space as it can only lead subscription cancellation when compliance is close to 100%.

The atmosphere in the Royal Society was thick with the sense of commercial entitlement. When a representative of the House of Lords asked what was the point of publishers when they could be replaced by repositories, Steve Hall from IOPP responded tetchily by asking what was the point of the House of Lords.

I have less and less understanding why the government insists on consulting with the current commercial service providers. (Did it ask permission of Dell and HP PC manufacturers before the funding councils pursued new kinds of e-science cyberinfrastructure based in the cloud?)

That was the basis of my question to the chair: why does the Finch report state that it is concerned about the sustainability of the "complex ecology of research communication"? Research communication itself is quite simple, it is the broader research ecosystem incorporating hundreds of thousands of researchers writing and reading millions of papers annually - that is the complex ecosystem in need of consideration.

And it is not run for the benefit of publishing companies.

Sent from my iPhone

On 9 Mar 2013, at 17:10, "Friend, Fred" <f.friend at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:f.friend at ucl.ac.uk>> wrote:

Open access in the UK is coming to a crossroads. Pointing in one direction are members of the political and scientific Establishment, working hard to convince the UK research community that a preference for APC-paid open access is the way to go, while wishing to travel down another road to open access are many senior people in universities and also many of the younger researchers, understanding the value in institutional repositories which the political and scientific Establishment refuse to support. Standing in the middle of the crossroads are many of the society publishers the Government wishes to protect, liking the Government’s policy in principle but not liking the uncertainties surrounding the implementation of that policy.
A discussion and dinner held at the Royal Society one evening this week illustrated the determination of the political and scientific Establishment in the UK to force through an APC-preferred open access policy:

· No supporter of the repository route to open access was invited onto the panel at the meeting and the few dissenters from the Government/RCUK policy invited to the meeting found it very difficult to catch the Chairman’s eye.

· The repository route to open access was only mentioned as a threat to the publishing industry and not as opportunity to introduce an academic-friendly and cost-effective business model for scholarly communication.

· Opposition to the Government/RCUK policy came from a society publisher, on the grounds that the UK Government has not fully-funded a policy that will enable the publishing industry to survive in an open access world.

· The unwillingness of the UK Government to consult with supporters of open access repositories is also illustrated by a response received this week to an FOI Request asking for details of a meeting held by Minister David Willetts on 12 February 2013. This meeting was attended by 12 representatives from publishers and learned societies with publishing interests and only 4 representatives from Higher Education.

· The UK Government bias towards consultation with publishers was first illustrated by the response to an FOI Request in 2005, which revealed that the then Minister Lord Sainsbury had more meetings on open access with publisher representatives than with research representatives.
Most UK universities are continuing to support their institutional repositories and adding versions of research papers to those repositories. Universities unable to afford the cost of the Government/RCUK preferred policy may decide to use the RCUK’s promise that institutions will have discretion to choose for themselves between the various open access models and opt for more green than gold. The only beneficiaries from the Government’s preferred policy appear to be the high-profit STM publishers - who will continue to dominate both subscription and open access markets - and a small number of open access publishers with strong academic support. Amongst the losers may be the smaller society publishers without the breadth of support to secure a significant share of the open access publishing market. It is to be hoped that the promised monitoring of both the Finch Report Recommendations and the RCUK policy will take a broader view of open access and of the effect of policies than has been evident to date.
Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk

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