All that glitters : Nature News & Comment

"In 2012, the United Kingdom took a bold leap on open-access publishing, announcing that all research articles produced by its publicly funded scientists should be made free to read. A fine pledge, but three years on, it has experienced some practical difficulties. It is instructive to examine them ... Many nations have not set open-access policies. Others, including the United States, are loitering with little intent, and mandating only delayed access to an author’s version of a peer-reviewed manuscript — a ‘green’ form of open access that ultimately benefits science less (see Nature 494, 401; 2013). RCUK favours a mixed model, but one that gradually migrates towards gold. A review of its progress, published in March, serves as a useful guide and should be examined by funders, publishers and institutions (see go.nature.com/tz2orl).  One problem is that it is hard to track progress, good or bad. RCUK and many British institutions cannot systematically count RCUK-funded papers, let alone those published as open access. As a result, RCUK, although strongly confident, cannot be entirely sure whether the £17-million (US$25-million) open-access fund it gave to universities in 2013–14 has produced the desired result of at least 45% of its funded papers being either green or gold open access.  This underlines the need for researchers to use the ORCID system, a single digital identifier for individuals that links their published papers and grant applications. Use of FundRef, a service from non-profit publisher alliance CrossRef for reporting funding sources, is also essential ... Open-access licences are another major source of confusion. The London-based biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust, which has long mandated gold open access and provides the funds to cover it, reported last month that it now sees 87% compliance with its policy — but that only 66% of papers are accompanied by a liberal publishing licence that allows extensive reuse of text. Licence information, it says, is often ambiguous or contradictory, and records for open-access payments can be lost between authors and publishers.  RCUK says that the licence problem is compounded by researchers not understanding which licence they need to use to comply with the open-access policy, and by publishers offering a range of ‘open’ licences. (Since January, all 18 open-access journals owned by Nature Publishing Group have switched to using the fully liberal CC-BY 4.0 licence as a default, and to charging a flat fee.) And then there are costs. All experiments should be encouraged in the evolving gold open-access market, but academics should know that fees for papers published in fully open-access journals are lower than those of ‘hybrid’ subscription journals that allow an open-access option. The Wellcome Trust says that the average fee levied by hybrid journals is 64% higher than that charged by fully open-access titles. British funders are now pondering steering the market by dissuading researchers from publishing in hybrid journals, as other countries have done ..."