Key Questions for Open Access Policy in the UK | Reciprocal Space

“ ... in the few weeks since the government’s response to the Finch report and the announcement of the new open access (OA) policy of the UK Research Councils (RCUK), the ground has settled... Not everyone is happy with what they see.  From April 2013 RCUK will require all its funded researchers to publish in OA journals. They will be able do this by paying an article processing charge (APC) from funds awarded by the research councils to the their institution... Alternatively, the researcher can go down the green OA route... This route is free but permitted under the new policy only if the publisher’s embargo is less than 6 months (12 for papers in the humanities and social sciences).  In principle, both gold and green routes to OA comply with the RCUK new policy, but in practice the emphasis is on gold...  I was generally positive in my initial response to what I saw — and still see — as a bold move. But I have been reassessing in the light of analyses of Finch and the RCUK policy by people who have thought about open access for a lot longer than me: Alma Swan, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad... I thought I would try to distill the key questions as we start to figure how the policy will work in practice, something that RCUK acknowledges still needs to be sorted out..."