Science community urged to unite on open access | Chemistry World

"Arguments over fine detail should not derail moves towards open access (OA) publishing for scientific research, according to those with the biggest stake in future changes. Meeting at a debate held at the Royal Society in London, UK, on 25 February, all parties agreed that progress will only be made if everyone can be persuaded to cooperate for the common good. Representatives from government, funding bodies, publishers, libraries and researchers all gathered to discuss the challenges of implementing a significant change in the way the UK’s scientific research is published. This meeting follows a sea change in UK government policy on the publication of scientific research. Publically funded research is now required to be freely available online, rather than behind publishers’ journal subscription paywalls. However, making that transition presents something of an obstacle course. There are costs to be met, infrastructure to put in place and mechanisms to be agreed. While such debates are important, David Sweeney from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Hefce) described the ‘ferment of debate’ as including significant amounts of ‘friendly fire’ – disagreements between partners with broadly the same goals over fine details. ‘We wish to move on,’ Sweeney said, ‘but we can only do that if we all want to participate.’  With this in mind, Hefce has launched a wide-ranging consultation on how to integrate OA requirements into its Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment programme following the 2014 REF.  One source of concern is the potential misalignment of UK policy with the rest of the world in its focus on the gold OA model. Last year, the European commission announced that it expects all outputs funded by its Horizon 2020 programme to be made open access, but stated no real preference as to achieve this. On the other hand, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the US,issued a mandate to the country’s funding bodies to make the research they fund publically available. However, that mandate focuses very clearly on green OA, with no extra funding for gold.  But to David Willetts, the UK’s universities and science minister, the situation is clear. ‘In the long term, gold OA achieves the objective of universal, immediate access to research unambiguously, while honestly recognising that there are costs associated with publishing,’ he said at the meeting. While he acknowledged that we cannot afford to switch universally to gold straightaway, and that there will be a mixed gold and green OA economy for many years to come, he asserted that the government’s view is that, in the long term, green OA is unsustainable.  When questioned about the potential risks and rewards of taking such an aggressive stance in favour of gold OA, Willetts stressed that moving first provides ‘a mark in the ground’ and allows the UK to influence the debate in other arenas ..."