Towards Fairer Access and Citation of Versions of Record: On the the UK Parliament BIS Committee's Open Access Recommendations | HASTAC

" ... Yesterday's morning the UK Parliament's Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee published a report including their conclusions recommendations on the UK  government’s policy on OA. You can read the conclusions and recommendations (it won't take you long) here: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmbis/99/9911.htm My own view as the editor-in-chief of a researcher-led Gold Open Access journal is that the BIS Committee's recommendations are largely positive. I fail to see however why Gold Open Access would 'overlook' Green Open Access (depositing on institutional repositories). As my colleague Neil Stweart (Repository manager at City University London and member of Library Tech Committee of Open Library of the Humanities) pointed out, "green is perfectly compatible with gold models, including low/no APC gold journals' (tweet, 10 September 2013, 10:34 AM, https://twitter.com/neilstewart/status/377364452011945984; Accessed 10 September 2013, 10:48 AM). I particularly welcome that the Committee emphasises that 'long embargoes are a barrier to access,' (point no. 9) but I personally maintain that a maximum of 6 month embargoes on STEM subject research and up to 12 month embargoes for HASS subject research is still way too long. As a researcher and editor I find the current Green/Gold alternative unsatisfactory, as it fails to address one of the biggest problems in current academic publishing, which is that researchers are alienated from their own work by commercial publishers who often retain all copyright and impose long embargoes. This can also mean, in practice, a great hurdle for increasing the public impact of research that is often of public interest. In practice this means that researchers without institutional access to paywalled versions of record are still deprived from this content, and forced to either break the law and request the sharing of PDFs 'under the table' from more privileged colleagues or wait until the research is old to access it as a slightly different version which is also rarely cited as such (the version that is likely to get cited is the one to which the researcher had no access).The cost to download individual articles from journals researchers have no access to remains unrealistic (some articles are priced the equivalent of £2 per page), so inter-researcher online piracy of versions of record is common practice, though logically  illegal. As Martin Eve suggests, 'we need to fix citation norms to permit IR citation (and strong versioning)' (tweet, 10 September 2013, 10:18 AM,  https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/377360333826170880, accessed 10:58 AM). In brief as I said above I find the Committees recommendations very positive, as they might help strengthening a culture of depositing academic research in institutional respositories. The recommendations to look at Article Processing Charge (APC) and to keep an 'open mind' regarding licensing options in the transition towards wider OA are also very welcome.  However, there is so much more to be done. Any report on APC pricing should take into account that not all publishers are alike, and that independent, researcher-led publishers which are not legacy publishers are also part of the OA publishing sphere. There is also the need to keep clarifying that Gold OA does not alway mean expensive/unreasonable APCs.  I wish it were not perceived as a radical notion, but a transition towards fairer access to research for those both 'inside' and 'outside' academia needs to seek practical ways in which publishing can be financially sustainable without it meaning simply inverting the current business model, in which publishers charge institutional libraries very dear subscription fees for bundles of journals.  Seeking practical and sustainable ways of increasing access requires a more thorough transformation of the academic publishing landscape, and this includes researchers and not only publishers. Awareness and clarity about the real costs of academic publishing would be a good start. This could be followed by the recognition that the research many researchers wish to cite is the peer-reviewed, professionally copyedited versions of record, and that access to this research needs to be timely and not after embargo periods during which other colleagues from wealthier institutions have already accessed it months ago.  We need to emphasise that Gold OA is completely compatible with institutional repositories. In my opinion a Green-only option that leaves the paywalled business model uninterrogated fails to tackle what I perceive as the biggest obstacle to fairer (legal) access to knowledge.  Mandating Green OA is a positive step in the right direction, but it might merely provide a temporary paliative to what still keeps most (version of record) research inaccessible by many on a timely and sustainable fashion."