RCUK and Hefce step up push for open access

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"Research Councils UK and the Higher Education Funding Council for England have agreed to work together to advance the transition to open-access publishing of research. The two bodies have pledged to work with other research funders, learned societies and publishers to “support a managed transition to open access over the medium term”. Astrid Wissenburg, director of partnerships and communications at the Economic and Social Research Council and a member of the RCUK Impact Group, said the move had been instigated by the government’s transparency agenda. In support of that aim, David Willetts, the universities and science minister, chaired a recent round-table discussion on promoting greater open access to research. Dr Wissenburg said the research councils had for several years had an open-access mandate that required authors to deposit their papers in open-access repositories as soon as was practicable. The councils also consider author charges for “gold” open access to be an allowable indirect cost. However, she said, compliance with the mandate was “not high” and the processes needed to be simplified for researchers. “It shouldn’t become a huge hurdle, but I am not sure we have cracked that bit of it.” An impending internal research councils’ review might result in them “pushing the gold route a bit more”, Dr Wissenburg said....Michael Jubb, director of the Research Information Network, said cooperation between the funding and research councils was essential to supporting any major move towards open access, in particular the gold version – because the demise of the subscription model would transfer the burden of paying for journals from library budgets, which are provided by the funding councils, to individual researchers, who are funded by the research councils...."

Link:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416334&c=1

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea Imports

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.gold oa.green oa.funding oa.rcuk oa.compliance oa.hefce oa.repositories oa.journals oa.uk

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 13:38

Date published:

05/28/2011, 09:30