OA in Britain: We Have a Rule, Now Let’s Get Some Data

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-04-23

Summary:

"Having taken the plunge last year and ordered all government sponsored academic research to be open for public view, the British government decided it would be useful to understand what open access might mean for the social sciences and the humanities—especially in a world where lots of British research does not appear in British journals ... To address the impact of OA on some of the less-fleshed-out areas of academe, the Higher Education Funding Council for England commissioned the British Academy to ask salient questions about how social sciences and humanities publishing differs from the physical sciences, how 'compliant' journals based outside the UK are with the Britain’s mandates, and what the new regime means for two important stakeholders—libraries and journal publishers.  'It seemed to us,' explained Rebecca Darley, Daniel Reynolds and Chris Wickham, the authors of the resulting Open access journals in Humanities and Social Science, 'that RCUK and other public bodies were making assumptions about the likely future open access policies of non-UK journals which were based on very little evidence, and that there was thus a danger that the academic sector might find that the UK rules for open access publication accidentally locked UK academics out of international scientific exchange.'  Their findings, they argue, matter beyond Great Britain, both because the UK is pioneering the OA mandate and because British scholarship 'punches above its weight.' But it doesn’t punch so far above its weight that the requirement to comply with the OA rules couldn’t somehow hurt academics trying to publish on the international stage ... "

Link:

http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/oa-in-britain-we-have-a-rule-now-lets-get-some-data/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.green oa.gold oa.mandates oa.rcuk oa.hefce oa.uk oa.funders oa.humanities oa.british_academy oa.reports oa.comment oa.new ru.sparc oa.repositories oa.policies oa.ssh oa.journals

Date tagged:

04/23/2014, 18:46

Date published:

04/23/2014, 10:03