UK's open access policies have global consequences
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-09-17
Summary:
The chairman of the BIS Committee, Adrian Bailey, noted that: 'Current UK open access policy risks incentivising publishers to introduce or increase embargo periods'. But it is more than a risk – there is clear evidence this has occurred. Current RCUK policy allows publishers to impose embargoes of up to 12 months and in some cases even 24 months before authors are allowed to place their work in green open access repositories. The BIS Committee is concerned that publishers could try to force authors into an upfront, 'gold' payment by stretching out these embargo periods for as long as they can, effectively preventing public research from being accessed quickly for free. An example is Emerald, a UK based publisher, which recently introduced a 24-month embargo period as a direct response to the RCUK policy. Springer, the world’s second largest journal publisher, previously imposed no embargo period on authors depositing work in their institutional repository. But earlier this year, it introduced a 12-month embargo on final peer-reviewed versions. Springer contends that its change in policy was not spurred by RCUK, but rather to make rules more consistent. Importantly, the BIS Committee report notes that extended embargo periods are maintained or introduced despite a lack of evidence that shorter embargoes harm publishers. Publishers continue to impose embargoes according to UK rules and the repercussions are felt around the world. In Australia, for example, this affects whether a researcher can comply with recently introduced rules from two major national funders, the Australian Research Counci and the National Health and Medical Research Council. These require an open access copy to be available no later the 12 months after the publication date. If international publishers exploit the longer open access periods currently allowed by the UK government, Australian researchers will struggle to comply with the rules of their own funders ... And it is not just embargo periods that publishers have altered as a response to the RCUK policy. The policy places restrictions on the licensing terms of published open access articles, requiring the papers to be made available under a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence. This provides an opportunity for publishers to create price differentiation between different licences. Nature, for example,announced in November last year that publishing with a CC-BY licence would cost between £100 and £400 more than publishing under a more restrictive licence. The BIS Committee report is good news for repository-based mandates like those in Australia ..."