Arcadia Fund | Our response to UKRI's open access review consultation - Arcadia Fund

"The publisher must make efforts to advertise the existence of a freely available version on the DOI-landing page of the publisher version of the work, and in all metadata supplied in the form of MARC records, ONIX feeds, and CrossRef DOI associated metadata. The licence of the work should be clearly given on the DOI-landing page and in all forms of associated metadata that the publisher supplies be it MARC or ONIX or DOI or all. If the publisher is known to not provide adequate metadata about open access and open access licensing, then withhold all Book Publishing Charges from that publisher until they provide it. Better still, warn authors not to submit to the publisher with a ‘blacklist’ of non-compliant publishers.

Some publishers both in journals and in monographs have been doing rather sneaky things to hide the existence of a freely accessible version. See Piwowar (2018) ‘Where’s Waldo With Public Access Links’. For ‘gold’ open access works, ensure the publisher creates a link from which the entirety of the book can be downloaded as PDF (or other format e.g. EPUB) in one-click – far too many platforms break-up books into chapters with absolutely no provision of a link to download the work in its entirety – this is annoying for users...."