[GOAL] Re: PURE nonsense

[Lucie Burgess]

Dear Stevan, all

I think it’s worth noting that HEFCE has in fact changed its policy to ‘the published version’ rather than the author accepted manuscript for open access articles published under the ‘gold’ route, hence delaying open access to the article until it is published. See: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/Year/2015/CL,202015/ and scroll to the heading ‘gold open access outputs’.

And PURE is not the only CRIS system being adopted by UK universities to help them manage the administrative burden of the REF or reporting and statistics required by many funders to support compliance.

Kind regards,
Lucie

Lucie Burgess
Associate Director for Digital Libraries
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Clarendon Building, Broad Street, Oxford
Senior Research Fellow, Hertford College
Tel: +44 (0)1865 277104
+44 (0)7725 842619
Twitter @LucieCBurgess
LinkedIn LucieCBurgess
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6601-7196
Get ready for the REF – Act on Acceptance<http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/home-2/act-on-acceptance/>




From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Date: Wednesday, 11 November 2015 16:09
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Subject: [GOAL] PURE nonsense


PURE is a Trojan Horse from Elsevier<https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/pure> that (some) UK institutions have allowed to enter their portals. It is a trick, by Elsevier, to insinuate themselves into and retain control of everything they can: access, timing of access, fulfillment of mandates, research assessment, everything. The ploy was to sneak in via CRIS’s, which are systems for institutions wishing to manage and monitor their metadata on all their functions.

Notice that the following passage from KCL's OA Policy<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/governancezone/Assets/InformationPolicies/Open%20Access%20Policy.pdf> makes no mention of timing:

In internal evaluation procedures it will be expected that all publications considered as part of appraisal or promotional assessments, will have a metadata record in the Research Information System, Pure, with either the full text article attached and downloadable from the Research Portal, or a link to the Open Access article on the journal’s web site.

What Pure is in reality designed to do is to make sure that the full text is not openly accessible until after the publisher embargo on Open Access.

In point of fact, the battle for OA has long shifted to the arena of timing: The 1-year (or longer) embargo is the one to beat. Access after the embargo elapses is a foregone conclusion (publishers have already implicitly conceded on it, without overtly saying so). But access embargoed for 12 months is not OA. Publishers want to make sure (1) there is no OA before the embargo elapses, (2) the embargo is as long as possible, and even after the embargo, (3) access should be via the publisher website, or at least controlled in some way by the publisher.

That’s exactly what PURE + CRIS does.

And (some) UK institutions (under pressure from Finch’s fatal foolishness — likewise originating from the publisher lobby) have been persuaded that PURE will not only provide all the OA they want, but will take a lot of other asset-management tasks off their shoulders.

It’s a huge scam, masquerading as OA, and its only real function is to strengthen the perverse status quo — of ceding the control of university research access to publishers — even more than they had before.

It won’t succeed, of course, because HEFCE/REF2020 has nailed down the timing of full-text deposit as having to be made within 3 months of acceptance (not publication) for eligibility for REF2020, which a metadata promissory note from Elsevier will not fullfill. My hope is that universities will be as anxious as they have been for 30 years now not to risk REF ineligibility by failing to comply with this very specific requirement.

(And the institution’s copy-request Button<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1110-Importance-of-Request-Copy-Button-in-Implementing-HEFCEREF-Immediate-Deposit-Policy.html> will take care of the rest, as long as all full-texts are deposited within Acceptance + 3.)

(I think it was a mistake on HEFCE/REF’s part to state formally that there is no need to archive the dated acceptance letter that defines the acceptance date, but again I trust in the anxiety of universities to comply with REF2020 eligibility requirements to draw the rational conclusion that is indeed within 3 months of acceptance that deposit must be done for eligibility, and not 12 months after publication.)

As you will see from the ROARMAP data below, KCL’s OA policy<http://roarmap.eprints.org/690/> alone is not compliant with the requirement for REF2020 eligibility, and the above extract does not change that one bit!

Best wishes,

Stevan


King's College London
General

Country:        Europe > Northern Europe > United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland<http://roarmap.eprints.org/view/country/826.html>
Policymaker type:       Research organisation (e.g. university or research institution)
Policymaker name:       King's College London
Policymaker URL:        http://www.kcl.ac.uk/index.aspx
Policy URL:     http://www.kcl.ac.uk/governancezone/InformationPolicies/Open-Access-Policy.aspx
Repository URL: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/
Policy adoption date:   16 July 2012
Source of policy:       Administrative/management decision
Policy Terms

Deposit of item:        Required
Locus of deposit:       Institutional Repository
Date of deposit:        When publisher permits
Content types specified under the mandate:      Peer-reviewed manuscripts
Journal article version to be deposited:        Not Specified
Can deposit be waived?: Not specified
Making deposited item Open Access:      Required
Can making the deposited item Open Access be waived?:   Not Specified
Date deposit to be made Open Access:    When publisher permits
Other Details

Is deposit a precondition for research evaluation (the 'Liège/HEFCE Model')?:   Yes
Rights holding: Not Mentioned
Can rights retention be waived?:        Not specified
Can author waive giving permission to make the article Open Access?:    Not specified
Policy's permitted embargo length for science, technology and medicine: 6 months
Policy's permitted embargo length for humanities and social sciences:   12 months
Can maximal allowable embargo length be waived?:        Yes
Open licensing conditions:      Other
Gold OA publishing option:      Permitted alternative to Green self-archiving
Funding for APCs where charged by journals:     Funder provides specific additional funding for APCs
APC fund URL (where available): http://www.kcl.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/openaccess/funding.aspx



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