[GOAL] Fwd: HEFCE Consultation on limiting submission to future REF to Open Access papers

[Stevan Harnad]

Some responses to UKCRC Comments on *UKCRC/CPHC Response to HEFCE Open
Access Consultation*:

*UKCRC reply to Question 1 *
*Although UKCRC and CPHC strongly supports open access, and thinks this
should be encouraged by HEFCE and the Research Councils, we oppose the
policy of introducing criteria other than research excellence into the REF
research assessment process*.


This is a profound (and potentially extremely damaging) misunderstanding:


*HEFCE is not proposing repository deposit as a criterion for research
assessment. *

It is proposing repository deposit as the* mechanism for submitting
published papers for research assessment.*

*UKCRC reply to Question 2a *
*Although we think that authors should make their publications available as
early as possible, it requires considerable manual effort to enter
information at time of acceptance, whereas this can often be automated
after publication on publishers web pages, so the criteria should only
insist on publication time plus about three months to allow automated
processing *

**
As the UKCRC/CPHC response itself states, "publication time" is extremely
vague and variable, and can diverge by years from submission date.

In contrast, the submission date (for the unrefereed draft) and acceptance
date (for the final, refereed, revised, accepted draft) are both very
specific, explicit calendar dates, in the author's workflow.

In addition, the publisher constraints and embargoes and uncertainties are
all on the publisher's version of record, not on the author's final draft.

Hence it would be extremely counterproductive to recommend to HEFCE that
the reference point should be the indeterminate date of publication rather
than determinate date of acceptance.

I do not know why it is stated that "*it requires considerable manual
effort to enter information at time of acceptance" *since that is the only
determinate date, and we are talking about a few keystrokes, and the
process could be as easily "automated" as the import of the version of
record from the publisher's website -- except that it would occur much,
much earlier.

*UKCRC reply to Question 2b:*
*
*

*We do not see the necessity for insisting on outputs being accessed only
through UK HEI repositories, as some communities use international ones
such as ACM Author-izer Service, ArXiv, PubMed etc.. *

**Automatic import can be and has been designed from Arxiv to institutional
repositories. The other sites are much too late in time and much more
indeterminate in date.


*UKCRC reply to Question 3: *
*We agree that pressure should be put on publishers to reduce embargo
periods for Green Open Access, but we do not support banning REF
submissions of outputs, from publishers that do not meet these criteria. *

*
*
Again, a profound misunderstanding:

What HEFCE mandates is *deposit* of the final draft immediately upon
acceptance. It does not mandate that the deposit be made *immediately OA*.
There is no constraint whatsoever an author choice of journal.

The allowable embargo length is an entirely different matter, to be
determined by RCUK and author practice. HEFCE is just stipulating the
timing and locus of deposit. The HEFCE deposit mandate, however, will be an
enormous help in ensuring that access delays are as short as possible (and
eventually zero)

I hope these UKCRC/CPHC recommendations will be reconsidered, especially in
light of the fact that "the Computing Science community has Green open
access as its dominant style of publication." The HEFCE mandate is needed
for all those other disciplines that do not yet have the wisdom of
UKCRC/CPHC!

Stevan Harnad
*
*
On 2013-10-07, at 11:59 AM, Morris Sloman <M.Sloman at IMPERIAL.AC.UK> wrote:

HEFCE are proposing that only open access papers can be submitted to the
next REF after 2014.
See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/ for an overview
of their proposals

The full consultation questions can be down loaded from

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2013/201316/


I attach the Draft combined UKCRC/CPHC response to the consultation.
Although we agree with open access we do not think this is a criteria for
REF submission.  The only criteria should be quality of research.

Closing date for comments is 25 October to allow me time to collate in the
final version.

I urge people to try and influence their own institutions to respond to
this.

HEFCE claims they have widespread support for the policy.
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