☆ New models for academic publishing | Mostly physics

"Undoubtedly open access in set to truly break through this year, mainly thanks to strong funder mandates (e.g. RCUK and Horizon 2020). The debate has started to shift to the relative merits of author-pays-gold (or rather, funder-pays; see below) and institutional-repositories-green models. (Please see Peter Suber’s widely accepted definitions for the terminology). Richard Poynder continues his important coverage of the developments, describing in detail the controversy over the UK’s gold-first policy in the international context: 'As the Committee began to explore the complaints it had received, a key issue emerged: Was RCUK’s policy in line with what the rest of the world was doing with OA, or was the country taking a risky gamble in the hope of acquiring a leadership role in the development of OA? [...] At a stroke, the risk the RCUK policy could pose for the UK begins to look much greater. If the rest of the world follows the US lead, rather than the lead of RCUK, the UK will likely discover that the extra transition costs it anticipates (paying both APCs and subscription) could continue indefinitely.'  The 'US lead' refers to the just introduced US bill dubbed FASTR, which would require free public access to all federally funded (published) research after a 6 month embargo period (green self-archiving), and also includes a lauded new open data component. Although such legislation has been introduced before, the current political climate is looking more amenable this time around. As the White House was still obligated to respond to a petition that gathered 65000 signatures demanding such a mandate, there were realistic hopes for a strong response from the Obama administration. Thus, although not completely unexpected, The White House’s response to the petitioners last Friday was well received indeed ..."