» Choices, choices in the UK’s two-tier scholarly publishing system: Open Access and Creative Commons Licences for funded and unfunded research Daniel Allington
pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2014-11-03
Summary:
"I’ve written on Open Access in general terms before (Allington 2013a, Allington 2013b; see Anderson 2013 for further discussion), but now the issues are personal for me in a way they didn’t use to be. RCUK policy on Open Access is creating a two-tier system for research publication, and I’m about to find myself on both sides of the artificial divide. It’s like this. It just so happens that there are a couple of proposed special issues of scholarly journals that it looks like I’ll be contributing to (once as myself, once as first among equals in a team of three), and that both are likely to see print at about the same time. One of the papers in question arises from research I did in my own time, and is therefore unaffected by Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy on Open Access (RCUK 2013). The other arises from research supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council or AHRC (though come to think of it, much of the work was again done in my own time), so it is very much affected. To recap, Open Access is required for all papers reporting research supported by one or other of the UK Research Councils, but the authors of such papers are presented with two ways by which to achieve this: the ‘gold’ route and the ‘green’ route. ‘Green’ means (a) publishing the paper in a paywalled journal but also (b) depositing a pre-publication copy of the paper in an online repository, where it can be accessed free of charge (‘pre-publication’ means that it’s the author’s unedited manuscript, with no work done on it by the publisher’s staff). ‘Gold’ means publishing the paper in a journal operating on an author-pays rather than reader-pays business model. Some journals, including both of the journals I’m talking about publishing in, operate on both business models simultaneously, which appears to provide me with my first choice ..."