How did the UK government manage to spoil something as good as open access? | Impact of Social Sciences

"... The problem for open access developments in the UK is that Rt Hon David Willetts MP stepped into the steady progress that was being made with ready-made views of his own about how open access should develop, outlining those views to the Publishers Association on 2 May 2012. A few months earlier he had set up a group to consider the way in which open access should be implemented, the membership of the group chosen carefully to reflect the Minister’s priorities of protecting the UK publishing industry and the large learned societies with publishing interests. Surprise, surprise: the report of the Finch Group followed the Minister’s own stated views very closely. No doubt the Minister expected nothing but praise for the Finch recommendations and less than one month after the publication of the Finch Report announced the Government’s acceptance of the main recommendations. A wise Minister would perhaps have waited to see if some differing views might be expressed, for as soon as the new policy was announced, the e-mail lists and blogs were full of critical comments ... The UK academic community is now living with the perverse effects of the Finch Report, the Ministerial statement accepting the Finch recommendations and their subsequent application in the Research Councils’ policy on open access. The key policy change recommended by Finch and accepted by the Minister was that 'a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research'. The effect of this hasty decision has been to: [1] divert more taxpayer funds into the publishing industry, reinforcing the already considerable profits made from the sale to libraries of journal subscriptions;[2] fail to develop the valuable service being offered by university repositories for access to the work of a university’s own researchers; [3] leave the UK out-of step with open access policies in every other country in the world, where even-handed policies between journal access and repository access to research reports are commonplace; [4] oblige universities to find additional funds for payments to publishers to meet the shortfall in the extra taxpayer funding provided by the Government for this policy; [5] oblige RCUK to change its previous even-handed open access policy in favour of publication in open access journals; [6] distort the UK publishing market in favour of APC-funded open access journals at the expense of subscription journals or open access journals not requiring the payment of an APC by only funding open access journals; [7] fail to help those small societies struggling to maintain their own journals in a market dominated by multinational commercial publishers; [8] encourage publishers to introduce longer embargoes before researchers can see repository versions of journal articles; and [9] force upon researchers in all disciplines a policy which had been developed within the biomedical community ... Many of the flaws in the UK Government’s open access policy have been recognised by the Parliamentary BIS Committee, which in a report dated 10 September 2013 described the Government as “mistaken” in focusing on publication in APC-paid open access journals as the route to full open access. Despite this clear message to the Government, UK governments are not known for their willingness to change policies in response to a parliamentary committee ... Will the Government be strong enough to resist the pressure from vested interests and follow the evidence? We shall know the answer to that question within a few weeks ... Publishers are not the only organisations able to lobby Government! Universities can tell David Willetts that they want their researchers’ publications to be available through an open access repository without unnecessary delay ..."