[GOAL] Re: license questions

Fri Apr 10 09:45:34 BST 2015

Hi Jean-Claude

Actually, the actual RCUK policy does cover the full range of gold and green OA.  It is not an APC-OA policy.  RCUK consider a journal to be compliant with their policy if (http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicy.pdf):

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The journal provides, via its own website, immediate and unrestricted access to the final published version of the paper, which should be made available using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and allows immediate deposit of the final published version in other repositories without restriction on re‐use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher.

Or,

The journal consents to deposit of the final Accepted Manuscript in any repository, without restriction on non‐commercial re‐use and within a defined period. No APC will be payable to the publisher.

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There is a ‘may’ in the sentence about payments of APCs.  Also, any journal allowing full deposit without embargo is fully acceptable!  RCUK has expressed 'a preference for immediate Open Access with the maximum opportunity for re‐ use’ which has led many to assume that it is a Gold-OA policy and therefore (at least in STM) a mainly APC-OA policy.

Where is think the policy has got into problems is that it is being interpreted (and RCUK has allowed it to be interpreted) as being a hierarchy.  So it is perceived that an author can only follow the green route if they do not have funds to pay an APC.  This confusion has been fuelled by the adoption by the UK government and RCUK of the misleading Publishers Association ‘decision tree’ that directs authors to APC-OA if they have access to funds.  Stephen Curry has written very persuasively on the problems with the current version of the decision tree:

http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2015/03/30/open-letter-publishers-association-please-amend-open-access-decision-tree/

David

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On 9 Apr 2015, at 22:56, Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca<mailto:jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>> wrote:

Just a couple of comments:

RCUK's present policy does not cover the full range covered by the term "Gold", only APC-Gold. Let me remind everyone once more that Gold is agnostic as to business plan. It only describes open-access journals with all the qualities of open access.

Green does not equate with "delayed public archiving of manuscripts". A good Green mandate actually requires immediate deposit upon acceptance. Now, it may be that the deposited manuscript cannot be made immediately publicly accessible because of embargoes or interdictions to expose articles variously made by some publishers; however, the presence of a request button allows a very simple and direct contact between any individual requesting the article and the corresponding author of the article, the process then taking place as private correspondence.

Otherwise, the prognostications made by Dana Roth about a new government, etc., if true, would be most welcome indeed. The UK has put itself in a very silly situation with regard to Open Access.

--

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

Le jeudi 09 avril 2015 à 19:58 +0000, Dana Roth a écrit :
This from a recent item in Nature ...

"RCUK says that the licence problem is compounded by researchers not understanding which licence they need to use to comply with the open-access policy, and by publishers offering a range of ‘open’ licences. (Since January, all 18 open-access journals owned by Nature Publishing Group have switched to using the fully liberal CC-BY 4.0 licence as a default, and to charging a flat fee.)"

---

"The RCUK review did not have the remit to question whether RCUK should continue to hand out money for gold open-access publishing. But with a new UK government in the offing and the country looking increasingly isolated in its gold-leaning stance, there must be a concern that the agency might end up scrapping its gold preference. Last year, four influential UK university-funding bodies announced a green open-access policy that will further steer academics towards delayed public archiving of manuscripts."

More at: http://www.nature.com/news/all-that-glitters-1.17266?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150409

Dana L. Roth
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