Push for Open Access to Publicly Financed Research Swells Abroad - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Researchers, publishers, and librarians have spent a lot of this year firing up the longstanding debate over access to published research... This summer, the fervor has gone global, with policy makers in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, and in Australia signaling that they're ready to come up with some answers. Details vary from country to country and proposal to proposal, but the overall warming trend looks very clear. Last month, David Willetts, the British minister in charge of universities and science, announced that the government had accepted almost all the recommendations in a June report from the Finch Group ... In its response, the government endorsed the idea that publication in open-access journals (or in hybrid OA journals, in which only some of the content is open) should be the goal. It said that public-sector agencies that support research, like Research Councils UK, should find effective, flexible ways to help cover publishing costs while maintaining as much open access to research results as possible. And in a statement that ought to gladden the hearts of fair-use advocates, the government said: ‘Support for open-access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimize restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes.’ Soon after the British government endorsed the Finch Report, Research Councils UK issued its own updated policy on open access. It spelled out the expectation that researchers whose work is supported by the councils will ‘maximize the opportunities to make their results available for free.’ Then the European Commission weighed in, announcing on July 17 that it would make open access ‘a general principle of Horizon 2020,’ the European Union's framework for supporting research from 2014-20. In Denmark, meanwhile, a group of government research councils had already come out strongly in favor of open access in late June ... There's word out of Australia that Aidan Byrne, who took over this summer as head of the Australian Research Council, has his eye on the issue ... In an e-mail, Mr. Byrne confirmed that he's taking a close look at the issue, talking to ‘a range of stakeholders and considering factors such as the need to align changes with policies across Australia's major higher-education funding agencies...’ But I've seen and heard some dismay among open-access advocates about the news out of Britain. Some suspect that publishers had a strong—maybe too strong—hand in some of the decision making... Some publishers, though, point out that they too have a stake in coming up with workable open-access models. Springer, a large commercial publisher with a big stable of science journals, had a representative on the Finch Group. Eric Merkel-Sobotta is Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications. In an e-mail, he noted that Springer is ‘the largest open-access publisher in the world,’ with more than 330 journals of fully open access in its SpringerOpen and BioMed Central portfolios. The company offers a hybrid access option, called Springer Open Choice, for more than 1,300 of its subscription-supported journals... Probably the biggest specific worry I've heard about the policy direction in Britain, aside from questions about how to foot the bill, centers on enthusiasm for a model referred to as gold open access...”