[GOAL] Universities Australia OA timetable
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-04-18
Summary:
"This post may be unbelievable, so if you don't like reading unbelievable
things before breakfast, delay reading further until you think you can cope
with it.
Universities Australia (which is a body composed of all Australian
Vice-Chancellors) has released a paper in February, entitled 'An agenda for
Australian Higher Education 2013-2016'. In it the vice-chancellors express
their collected intentions and wisdom regarding open access. I quote from
the section subtitled 'Open access to research' on page 44: 'Universities Australia believes that there is enormous public benefit in
increasing access to the outcomes of all research, especially research that
has been publicly funded. There are a number of logistical, practical and
commercial issues that need to be addressed to achieve this goal and
Universities Australia, with the support of government, is committed to
making Australia's high-quality research output freely accessible to all.' So far, so good. Indeed, great! Now turn to 'Actions: Expand research
outreach' on p45 to see how motherhood statements become reality: 'To increase the visibility of university outputs and make them more useful
for the broader community, universities will include metadata on research
publications in their institutional repositories.'
Really? The metadata is already in the open domain. Metadata is a routine
by-product of publishing. Mind you, the universities will add Socio-Economic
Objective codes and Field of Research codes from the Australian Bureau of
Statistics classification, which publishers don't ... 'and will expand the proportion of full text publications available to 50%
by 2030.' 50% of what? Current annual output? 2013-2016 output? Measured how long
after publication? Why 50% which is not a stable position? And 17 years into
the future to achieve even this paltry target, by which time no current
vice-chancellor will still be in office; indeed in some cases there will be
two changes of CEO! This is just procrastination - poorly thought out, and a
fob-off. One could have hoped that Universities Australia could have been
more decisive. I suggest as an alternative:
Universities will provide the full text of all their research publications,
or a link to where such a full-text can be found, in their institutional
repositories no later than the end of 2016. Compliance should be measured
six months after publication in the case of biological and medical research,
twelve months in the case of all other sciences, and two years in the case
of humanities and fine arts."