Open Access, brick by brick

... “In stepping away from the RWA, Elsevier acknowledged that it had made a strategic mistake. It clearly also made a serious PR gaffe... researchers are continuing to sign up to the boycott Elsevier web site... What the RWA fiasco underlines is that while publishers are increasingly willing to embrace Gold OA (OA publishing), their antipathy towards Green OA (self-archiving) is growing, particularly where it is mandatory... Indeed, in announcing its withdrawal the publisher stressed that it remains firmly opposed to OA mandates... A week after the RWA died, after all, 81 publishers signed a letter opposing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)... far from outlawing the NIH policy, the FRPAA would propagate it — to around a dozen other US federal agencies. It would also reduce the embargo period from 12 months to six... In short, the battle for OA goes on, but looks set to be fought primarily over Green OA... Recent events on the other side of the globe would appear to confirm this... on 21st February the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced that it plans to introduce an NIH-style mandate — effective July 1st... Let’s examine what happened in Australia. The story appears to begin on January 5th, when Colin Steele, emeritus fellow of the Australian National University and convenor of the National Scholarly Communications Forum, published an opinion piece in The Australian. This alerted the research community down under to the RWA, and called on Australian universities to make a public statement in support of the NIH Policy and of Open Access. Then on February 15th Justin Norrie, news editor at the Australian information service The Conversation, published a story about the Elsevier boycott, pointing out that 97 Australian academics had joined the pledge not to publish in or edit Elsevier journals. In writing his article Norrie spoke to Danny Kingsley, the Australian National University’s manager of scholarly communications and e-publishing. And he quoted Kingsley saying, ‘The problem in Australia is that the research councils — the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council — award funding to academics who publish their work in the journals that are judged under a metrics system to have the most impact...’ Kingsley’s remark stung the CEO of the NHMRC Warwick Anderson into responding: In a comment piece published in The Conversation six days later, Anderson denied that NHMRC funding decisions are based on journal impact factors. ‘This is not true. NHMRC removed journal impact factors from its assessments some years ago...’ For that reason, he added, ‘From July this year, we will be mandating the deposit of publication outputs arising from NHMRC funded research into an institutional repository within 12 months of publication.’ ‘The new NHMRC policy is stronger than the old one,’ says US-based OA advocate Peter Suber. ‘The earlier policy encouraged OA without requiring it, but asked non-complying grantees to justify their non-compliance. That extra request put it above ordinary encouragement policies, just as the explicit requirement in the new policy puts it above the previous policy.’ However, he adds, ‘The 12 month embargo is a disappointment. NHMRC is following the NIH policy, of course.  But in this respect the NIH is the outlier, not the norm. To my knowledge, NHMRC is the first medical funder with an OA policy, after the NIH, to allow an embargo longer than 6 months...’ Whatever the reason for the timing, and the manner, of the announcement however, it serves to remind us that the path to OA rarely runs straight... Observers suggest that one reason for NHMRC’s delay was that the funder had hoped to be able to make a joint announcement with the Australian Research Council (ARC) which, like the NHMRC, has had a policy of ‘encouraging’ OA since 2006... A week after Anderson’s announcement, for instance, The Australian raised the issue of an OA mandate with ARC chief executive Margaret Sheil. Sheil responded that ‘open access publishing by grant recipients was encouraged where appropriate, but not demanded, by the ARC.’ She added that there was less need for the ARC to impose a mandate, since ARC-funded research was not generally of interest to the public... Sheil seemed to be implying that the primary purpose of OA is to make research accessible to the public, rather than to other researchers. She also seemed of the view that to demand that researchers make the output of their work OA would jeopardise their careers and/or was not possible. ‘In the humanities and many other areas it can be difficult to get published,’ Sheil told The Australian. ‘And what do you do about research for which the main form of publication is books? It's not that hard for a scientist to get papers into some sort of repository that's open access...’ Responding by email, an ARC spokeswoman said, ‘The ARC funds a more diverse range of disciplines and end users than the NHMRC, some of which would not be in a position to comply with a mandate — health and medical is