Parliamentary committee slams UK policy on open access | Reciprocal Space

The UK House of Commons has its dander up. Having bloodied the prime minister over Syria in the past fortnight, the select committee of MPs that oversees the work of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has issued a report that is heavily critical of the government’s policy on open access (OA). The report was published early this morning so I have had time only to skim through the conclusions and recommendations, but it makes for pretty stunning reading. Although the committee pauses briefly at the beginning to laud the government’s proactivity on open access, it proceeds to take issue with almost every plank of the policy put in place by RCUK over the past 12 months (following publication of the Finch Report) and calls for radical revisions. The committee traces the central problem to the fact that the Finch Report downplayed the importance of subject and institutional repositories as avenues for open access — so-called green OA. This led RCUK to put in place a policy that favoured gold OA, even though it was acknowledged to incur excess costs to research budgets in the transition away from subscription-based scholarly publishing. The committee recognises that a publication system based on purely open access journals — operating in a functional and transparent market — is a broadly agreed ultimate goal of policy in the UK and elsewhere, but criticises the government for plotting a route to that future that is excessively expensive and out of line with developments in most other parts of the world. Accordingly the committee’s report makes the following recommendations on repositories: [1] That the government build on existing investment on the UK repository infrastructure, specifically 'to promote standardisation and compliance across subject and institutional repositories' to enhance their utility as outlets for open access [2] That HEFCE should convert its current proposals to require immediate deposit in institutional repositories as a requirement for future REF eligibility into firm instructions [3] That RCUK should follow HEFCE’s lead by 'reinstating and strengthening the immediate deposit mandate in its original policy' ...  ‘Immediate deposit’ is not necessarily the same thing as immediate open access via a repository — the committee allow for embargo periods. However, it is critical of RCUK for permitting embargo periods to lengthen to 12 months and 24 months respectively for sciences and humanities research. Strangely, this was an alteration made in the aftermath of the investigation into open access by the House of Lords back in January — a concession, I guess, to the complaints of publishers and concerns expressed by some humanities scholars. But the House of Commons committee rightly notes “the absence of evidence that short embargo periods harm subscription publishers” and that the RCUK’s move has perversely degraded, rather than enhanced access to the research literature. In a further boost to green OA, the committee also asks RCUK to clarify its policy guidance once again. Although RCUK has already refined its original formulation to indicate that, while gold OA is preferred, authors and institutions can choose green OA, the committee is critical of the Publisher’s Association decision tree that was incorporated into the RCUK guidelines published in back in March. It rightly notes that this tree de-emphasises the green OA option and is liable to confuse authors. I would not be sorry to see it disappear. The shift in policy focus to green OA is partly driven by the committee’s concerns with excess costs to research and university budgets at a time of fiscal strain. I get the sense that they MPs have paid close attention to the 2012 analysis published by Swan and Houghton, which made it clear that although gold OA should give better value for money in the long run, the cheaper route to a fully gold OA scholarly publishing system was by mandating green OA. The committee articulates concerns on several points where it feels that insufficient care has been taken to ensure that the taxpayer is getting value for money for its investment in research and scholarly publication. It is worried that RCUK policy was built on rather generous assumptions about the necessary level of Article Processing Charges (APCs) that are often paid to journals for immediate open access. But that is not all, Several other recommendations address concerns about value for money. These include ..."