Home Gudgeon and gist Open Access Now UK Parliamentary Committee calls to improve the UK’s “mistaken” OA policy

UK Parliamentary Committee calls to improve the UK’s “mistaken” OA policy

Open Access Now 2013-09-12

On Tuesday, the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) issued a new report on the current Open Access policy in the UK. The report is the culmination of an inquiry started in January, and recommends significant revisions to the Open Access direction that was set following last year’s controversial Finch Report and the revised Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access Policy.

The Finch Report and the RCUK revisions place significant focus upon the paid publication model of article processing charges (APCs) or “Gold OA” as the primary way to comply with the Open Access Policy, while paying little attention to the Open Access route of depositing articles into an openly accessible disciplinary or institutional repository (“Green OA”). One of the more striking statements in the BIS report was that “While Gold Open Access is a desirable ultimate goal, focusing on it during the transition to a fully Open Access world is a mistake.” The report’s recommendations primarily center around shifting back to emphasizing green OA during this time of transition.

Some of the recommendations included in the BIS report are the following:

* RCUK reinstate and strengthen the immediate [green OA] deposit mandate in its original policy and improve the monitoring and enforcement of mandated deposit

* The Government and RCUK revise their policies to place an upper limit of 6 month embargoes on STEM subject research and up to 12 month embargoes for HASS subject research

* The Government should undertake a full cost-benefit analysis of open access policy, including the impact on different subject areas

* The Government should mitigate against the impact on universities of paying Article Processing Charges out of their own reserves; and

* If a preference for Gold is maintained, the Government and RCUK should amend their policies so that APCs are only paid to publishers of pure Gold rather than hybrid journals to eliminate the risk of double-dipping.

Peter Suber, who previously critiqued the RCUK policy, commented on the news by stating that “The new report makes all the right criticisms of the current policy, and all the right recommendations for improving it,” and Heather Joseph of SPARC called the announcement “very good news.”

Also noted by Suber is that BIS has no legal control over the current Open Access policy, but this report is a major political blow to the current policy. The Finch committee will be reconvening on September 24 for an annual scheduled review to assess the progress made in implementing its 2012 report.