Open Access in Focus – Guest Blog part IV | MMU Research and Knowledge Exchange Blog

"In my final blog on Open Access I will look at MMU’s response to OA. MMU, in common with many other Universities, is adopting the green route to OA.  This means that we are putting research outputs into e-space, our institutional repository, which will then allow them to be viewed freely over the Internet.  This will increase readership and disseminate the research beyond traditional journal subscribers as described in my previous blogs. One of the reasons MMU is not going down the gold route for OA publication for most of its research output is that there is usually a cost involved. This cost, the Article Processing Charge, or APC, will have to be paid for by the University.  In the wake of the Finch Report, RCUK gave some help to offset APC costs in the form of transition funding to Universities, but in 2013/14 MMU received only £11,442 (compared with £824,459 received by the University of Manchester).  On current rates of APC charges in high impact journals, this will only pay for about five or six APCs!  However, although MMU is adopting the green route to OA, there may be occasions when it is strategically advantageous to MMU to publish research in prestigious, high impact journals (which usually charge an APC).  In these cases, funds will be released to pay the APCs. The current method of getting outputs into e-space is to send them to the Library, and we will carry out the necessary administration and deposit them for you.  In future, outputs will be put into Symplectic Elements, our new CRIS (Current Research Information System) and from there, subject to routine checks, they will be deposited automatically into e-space, the ‘public face’ of MMU’s research.  (See Christian Woodward’s recent RKE blog post about Symplectic for further information.) Many publishers, having introduced APC’s to offset the revenue they will lose from subscriptions as more journals become OA, are responding by introducing deals to universities.  These often take the form of discounts on APCs if universities sign up to publishers over a period of time.  At present, MMU does not publish enough articles with one publisher to make these sorts of deals worthwhile or cost effective. OA publication is a complex and evolving area, which all universities and university libraries are grappling with.  Research Council funded research already stipulates that outputs should be published OA; this will be reinforced further as plans for the next REF are rolled out.  In these blogposts I have attempted to explain some of the issues surrounding OA and why you should engage with OA publication."