Taylor & Francis Online :: On Academic Integrity and the Right to Copy - Journal of Victorian Culture - Volume 18, Issue 4

Use the link to access the full text article published in the Journal of Victorian Culture available from Taylor and Francis.  The abstract reads as follows:  "In December 2012, the editors of 21 prominent UK history journals issued an open 

letter outlining their collective position on open access (OA). The letter was a response to policy developments in the wake of the adoption of recommendations that had emerged some months earlier in the Finch Report, the account of the findings of the government-commissioned working group on expanding access to research published 

in journals, chaired by Janet Finch.1 In the statement, the editors predict that the implementation of OA that was 

envisaged by Finch and subsequently endorsed by the government will have a ‘serious effect on the reputation of UK scholarship internationally, [and] on peer review’, and will lead to the ‘serious infringement of [authors’] intellectual property rights’. In the same opening paragraph, the signatories seek simultaneously to establish their bona 

fides as liberators of knowledge, declaring that they ‘fully support initiatives to make scholarship as widely and freely available as possible, above all online’.  There is an implied invitation to the reader to reflect on the compatibility of these 

apparently opposing declarations. The argument is that we can (and should) support the idea of making scholarship ‘as widely and freely available as possible’, while rejecting misguided attempts that will lead to the erosion of some of the major pillars of academic integrity: scholarly reputation, peer review and the rights of authors. That 

this is their view is demonstrated by the bold position they take, which places their journals clearly outside compliance with Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy.  Many of the responses to Finch and to RCUK have drawn on this essential proposition: OA is to be supported, but not at the cost of academic integrity; there are ways of 

delivering OA that would avoid such detrimental effects. Who could disagree? These binaries are not as simple as they seem ..."