Open and Shut?: Open Access: A Tale of Two Tables
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-02-22
Summary:
"In an article published recently by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Colin Macilwain concludes 'If the open-access story started as a battle between open-access advocates and publishers, it seems to have morphed into a feud between gold and green open access, which cuts out the publishers.' There is something in what Macilwain says, although in truth there has always been disagreement within the OA movement, and sometimes bitter wrangling between those who espouse Green OA and those who espouse Gold OA.
But there is no doubt that the publication last year of the Finch Report has brought a new intensity to this inter-movement discord, particularly after the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts accepted all bar one of the Finch recommendations — making the Finch view official UK government policy on OA. This saw Research Councils UK (RCUK) immediately introduce a new OA policy in order to comply with Finch, a policy that will come into effect on 1st April.
RCUK’s new policy has had the effect of rekindling and intensifying a number of disagreements within the OA movement, including a disagreement over the relative merits of so-called libre and gratis OA (the RCUK Policy requires that where authors pay for Gold OA their paper must be published under a CC-BY licence to allow reuse), and a disagreement over what constitutes an appropriate embargo length when researchers opt for Green OA (the RCUK Policy specifies either 6 or 12 months, depending on the research field).
But above all, as Macilwain noted, the new policy has reignited a long-standing disagreement between advocates of Green and Gold OA, especially over whether one form of OA should ever be prioritised over another (The RCUK policy controversially prefers Gold over Green, either pure Gold or Hybrid OA).
Historically, there was a consensus within the OA movement that it was not realistic to try and strong-arm researchers into publishing in OA journals, although you could mandate them to self-archive (Green OA).
Unfortunately, ambiguity over the precise requirements of the new policy has also led to considerable confusion and concern, not just over what the policy requires, but whether in its preference for Gold OA the UK is moving in step with other countries, or taking a risky new direction that could cost the country dear.
This confusion is graphically represented by two different tables that were drawn up to show how the UK policy compares with other OA policies around the world — one published by the RCUK (here) and one published by OA advocacy group SPARC Europe (here).
Strikingly, although both tables were intended to show the same thing, they offer a very different picture of the RCUK policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.