Making the potential actual | Research Information

"Those who might have the authority to compel compliance through various rewards or punishments are reluctant, when doing so would be orthogonal to the other interests that they have. The result has been an intense period of developing coalitions, consortia, partnerships and so on, in an attempt to align interests and activities; however, developing this network of alliances requires intensive effort and continual cultivation of commitment to maintain the alignment.

  The subscribe-to-open model being pursued by Annual Reviews and the library membership programme of the Open Library of the Humanities stand out as successful examples of this alliance development, but other attempts, such as the proposed Library+Funder model for flipping anthropology journals to open access, have stumbled.     Communication of open research policy is facilitated by the clarity of goals and objectives but hindered by the multiplicity of players and lack of clear authority for policy implementation.    This is brought into stark relief by recent reports that, even when open access publishing is a default option in a publishing agreement, and is available at no charge to the authors themselves, some authors – and sometimes a significant percentage of authors – are choosing to publish closed.    Given studies show that authors are generally supportive of open access publishing, but do not want to be responsible for paying for it, a reasonable hypothesis is that communication to authors about the funding practices for open access publishing is failing to achieve the understandings that it seeks among scholars.    Studies of compliance with open research mandates reveal challenges as well. Without compliance monitoring it is impossible for policy makers to know whether policy has been implemented effectively, or if adjustments to the policy mechanisms are needed in order to achieve the policy objectives.    As just one example, the US Government Accounting Office recently reported that the majority of agencies reviewed do not have compliance measures fully developed, or implemented measures to ensure adherence to public access requirements. ..."