Open and Shut?: UK House of Commons Select Committee publishes report criticising RCUK’s Open Access Policy

"The House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee has today published a critical report on the Open Access (OA) policy introduced on April 1st by Research Councils UK (RCUK).  While it welcomes the Government’s desire to achieve full OA, the Committee is critical of the way it is going about it, and critical of the way in which the Finch Report (which was commissioned by the Government) looked at the evidence and arrived at its conclusions — conclusions on which the RCUK policy is based.  Above all, the BIS Committee is highly critical of the Government’s and RCUK’s preference for Gold OA, and their failure to give due regard to the 'vital role' that Green OA and repositories can play in moving the UK towards full OA.  '[A]lmost without exception, our evidence has pointed to gaps in both the qualitative and quantitative evidence underpinning the Finch Report’s conclusions and recommendations,' the report says, 'most significantly a failure to examine the UK’s Green mandates and their efficacy.'  It adds, 'This has been replicated in the formulation of the Government and RCUK’s open access policies and their mistaken focus on the Gold solution as the primary route to achieving open access at scale in the UK.'  Rather than the Gold-preferred approach that RCUK has adopted, the Committee asserts, 'The major mechanism of transition must be Green open access, specifically through strong immediate self-archiving mandates set by funders and institutions, either as a funding condition or tied to research assessment as appropriate.'  Commenting on the report, Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, and MP for West Bromwich West, Adrian Bailey said, 'In a fully open access world, the benefits of Gold open access may well outweigh those of Green open access. We are not yet in an open access world, however, and the key to the success of open access policy is how we get there. The Government and RCUK have given insufficient consideration to the transitional period and the vital role of the Green route. The evidence suggests that the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold open access during a transition period are much higher than those of Green open access.'  RCUK’s Gold-preferred approach, explained Bailey, would be unnecessarily damaging for university budgets. 'At a time when the budgets of universities are under great pressure, it is unacceptable that the Government has issued an open access policy that will require considerable subsidy from research budgets in order to both maintain journal subscriptions and cover article processing charges'.  He added, 'It became increasingly evident during the course of our inquiry that some elements of the scholarly publishing market are dysfunctional. The Government’s open access policy risks making the situation worse, causing longer embargoes, restricting access, and inflicting higher costs on UK higher education institutions.'  Both the Finch Report and the subsequent RCUK policy have proved highly contentious, and subject to considerable criticism — not least during an earlier inquiry by the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee — here and here).   In response to this criticism RCUK has made a number of changes to its OA policy, including lengthening the permitted embargo period. The BIS Committee is now effectively asking RCUK to make a complete U-turn.  The BIS Committee has recommended that, amongst other things, RCUK reinstate and strengthen the immediate deposit mandate that was in its original policy (and in line with the proposals outlined by the Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE] in July), and that it revise its policy to place an upper limit of 6 month embargoes on STEM subject research and up to 12 month embargoes for HASS subject research.  It also recommends that the Government take an active role in promoting standardisation and compliance across subject and institutional repositories, and that it mitigate against the impact on universities of paying Article Processing Charges out of their own reserves.  If RCUK maintains its preference for Go