Open Access News

Fytton Rowland, Towards a grudging consensus? UKSG Serials eNews, May 17, 2009.  Excerpt:

Two recent reports have addressed the vexed issue of paying for open access, especially when it has been mandated, that is, insisted upon, by a research funding body. There are three main arguments for OA. The first, which appeals to academics, says that an author's work has more visibility and impact if it can be seen by everybody free of charge to readers. A second, which appeals to librarians, says that something has to be done about the problem of journal prices, which leads to annual cancellation exercises and to libraries thus becoming steadily less complete in the collections needed by their users. And a third says that if taxpayers have paid for research to be undertaken, then taxpayers should be able to read the results of that research without further payment. OA can be achieved in two ways - either by publication in a journal that accepts author-side payments to provide access free of charge to readers, or by deposition of the published paper in a repository that is freely available to readers.

SQW Computing undertook a study for Research Councils UK, Open Access to Research Outputs, which was reported in Times Higher Education on 30 April. RCUK's collective stance is broadly pro-OA, but the different Research Councils have adopted varying policies towards mandating OA, with only the EPSRC standing out against it completely....RCUK's response to the SQW report was to say that they would continue to strengthen their mandates to deposit copies in repositories, and would extend support for the pay-to-publish model as well.

Meanwhile, a study of the same problem has been published jointly by Universities UK and the Research Information Network, Paying for open access publication charges. The recommendations of this report have been endorsed by The Biosciences Federation - a collective body of a large number of learned societies in the biological area....

The report recommended that HEIs "should each set up a dedicated budget to pay author-side OA publication charges", and that funding bodies should "clarify how they will provide support for researchers to meet their open access policies, especially regarding the payment of OA publishing fees"....

Perhaps predictably, Professor Stevan Harnad, a leading advocate of achieving OA by the repository model, is reported in the THE as opposing the idea that Research Council funds should be used to cover publishers' author-side charges, while other OA advocates - including myself - have been calling for this to be permitted by the Research Councils for many years. It was perhaps inevitable that a body representing many learned society publishers would emphasise the OA publishing model over the repository one.

There are indeed good arguments for seeking a stable financial future for learned societies and other not-for-profit scholarly publishers....

The Biosciences Federation's current position does represent progress - from an OA advocate's perspective - from the earlier position taken by some learned society publishers, which was to ally themselves with the for-profit publishers in outright opposition to OA....

Comments

• It's disappointing that in an article specifically on paying for OA Rowland would repeat the error that all OA journals charge author-side publication fees.  Not only is it untrue for some OA journals; it's untrue for most OA journals, as we've known since 2005. 
• Rowland's claim about the EPSRC is out of date ("the different Research Councils have adopted varying policies towards mandating OA, with only the EPSRC standing out against it completely").  In January 2009 the EPSRC revealed that it had decided in December 2008 to adopt an OA mandate.