RCUK Compliance with Springer
abernard102@gmail.com 2012-12-19
Summary:
"In line with the UK government’s commitment to open access to publicly-funded research, additional funding will be provided to the top 30 research-intensive institutions in the UK to help the transition to open access and compliance with the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access Policy.
The new RCUK policy, based on the recommendations of the Finch Report on open access, was launched on 16 July 2012. It states that all published research articles and conference proceedings funded by the RCUK from 1 April 2013 must be open access. While the RCUK still supports open access via self-archiving (‘green OA’), the policy aims to make it easier for UK institutions and researchers to publish in fully or hybrid open access journals (‘gold OA’). Therefore, in addition to the £10 million in government funding, the RCUK will provide a block allocation to UK higher education institutions to fund payment of article-processing charges (APCs) associated with open access publishing. As the largest open access publishers with over 340 fully open access journals across all areas of science Springer is fully compliant with the new RCUK policy. All SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals as well as articles
published in our subscription-based journals using the Open Choice option are truly open access and Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licensed. The RCUK policy as well as the additional funding signal significant developments for the open access movement and reflect the increased interest in open access not only in the UK but across the globe, with more and more open access mandates being introduced and more funding being made available. Together with BioMed Central, we offer an Open Access Membership Program, which allows institutions, societies and funders worldwide to actively support open access. Concretely, we help them to establish affordable membership accounts to cover some or all of the publication costs for their individual researchers. To find out whether your institution is one of our over 400 members, please visit the SpringerOpen website..."