Reciprocal Space | Occam's Typewriter

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-11-05

Summary:

From 22-28 October 2012 the world celebrated open access week and along with many others I played a part in getting the message out, using a mix of traditional and new-fangled ways.  My week kicked off with a Monday-morningblogpost at Occam’s Corner about a nicely timedpaper from Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björkshowing that gold open access publications now account for 17% of the approximately 1.7 million research articles published in 2011... That afternoon I participated in the Opening Research and Data meeting at Birkbeck (jointly organised by LSHTM, Birkbeck, LSE, SOAS and City University) to talk about the shape of the open access landscape following the Finch Report and the announcement of the new RCUK OA policy. There’s a video of the entire proceedings and, for the time poor, a nice summary at the City Open Access blog; (my slides are also available on Slideshare)...  I was particularly interested — and pained— to hear of the experiences of Antonio Gasparrini, an early career researcher who talked about the travails of trying to balance his budget with the systemic demands that he comply with OA and publish in journals that would enhance his career prospects ... I would much rather he took the advice of another speaker, Melissa Terras, who showed how a modicum of social-media driven self-promotion can get your work the attention it deserves.   Last to speak was Ben Ryan of the RCUK who sought to further clarify their new OA policy, particularly on the point that it is up to authors and institutions to choose whether to publish via green or gold OA routes (something I covered recently). In the questions that followed Ryan was also at pains to emphasise that the research councils will be putting in place measures to ensure that their funded researchers comply with the new policy, something they have done only half-heartedly, if at all, in the past. These compliance rules will apply whatever the colour of the OA route selected. It is to be hoped that they will be forceful since, as Stevan Harnad and colleagues showed this past week, the strength of green OA mandates is strongly correlated with rates of deposition.  However, Ryan was not in a position to spell out the full details of the new compliance procedures ...  The following Wednesday Mark Thorley sought to add further justification of the organisation’s preference for gold on the RCUK blog. It is refreshing that RCUk is engaging in this open mode of communication but the case presented was not wholly convincing. The case rests on the principle that 'ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable'. From this principle flows the idea that payment of an APC to publishers ensure that the final peer-reviewed and formatted version of a research paper is made freely available from the date of publication and under a CC-BY licence that allows anyone or any organisation to re-use the content (so long as it is attributed), even for commercial products...  However RCUK seems to lack some conviction in either the worth of the CC-BY licence or in its right to enforce such a licence on the content of research published through the green OA route, since the policy allows RCUK-funded researchers to choose green or gold OA routes... Another oddit

Link:

http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.licensing oa.comment oa.government oa.mandates oa.green oa.copyright oa.cc oa.events oa.ir oa.uk oa.impact oa.presentations oa.social_media oa.prestige oa.funders oa.fees oa.rcuk oa.recommendations oa.compliance oa.finch_report oa.oa_week oa.respositories oa.ireland oa.europe oa.repositories oa.libre oa.policies oa.journals

Date tagged:

11/05/2012, 13:14

Date published:

11/05/2012, 08:14