Ensuring open access for publicly funded research | The BMJ

“The RCUK and Finch groups, like most supporters of open access internationally, prefer immediate open access and open licences to delayed open access and all rights reserved copyrights. These benefits are easier to achieve with gold open access than with green, but green open access can achieve them too if funders and universities are prepared to demand them. The RCUK and Finch group ultimately prefer gold to green because they want these benefits now, not later, because UK funders are willing to pay for them, because publishers want revenue beyond subscriptions for providing them, and because publishers had a major role in the policy deliberations.

The RCUK and Finch group take good advantage of the virtues of gold. The problem is that they fail to take good advantage of the virtues of green. The Wellcome Trust shows how to do the job better. The Wellcome Trust requires green open access for peer reviewed manuscripts arising from research that it has funded. If authors publish in open access journals with article processing charges, then the trust pays those fees and requires immediate open access under an open licence (soon to be CC-BY).10 Like the RCUK and Finch group, the Wellcome Trust mixes green and gold, but it harnesses the power of green open access to assure open access for its full research output. A rapidly growing number of funding agencies and universities from around the world take the same step for the same reasons. The green part of the trust’s larger open access policy may permit embargoes and omit open licences. But it is a fast and inexpensive first step to assuring free online access to research. That is a major advantage over the high access prices now shackling research, and that is the point. If we want to shorten embargoes and increase reuse rights, and we do, then we can take further steps, either by strengthening our green policies or paying for gold. What matters first is to use the tools we have to drive open access for the benefit of researchers and taxpayers….”

David Sweeney: UK right to pursue impact agenda | Times Higher Education (THE)

“Mr Sweeney’s powerful influence in steering the UK sector towards open-access research is a key part of his legacy, helping to set up the Finch report in 2011, which later laid down the “unanswerable” principle that “results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain”. As UK Research and Innovation’s lead on open access, Sweeney was also influential in ensuring the funder was an early supporter of Plan S, the Europe-wide open access drive, while UKRI’s own policies, which took effect in April, pushed requirements further. “The Finch report was significant and moved the dial on open access but without this global collaboration we won’t be able to move the system further,” he reflected….”

The findings from publicly-funded research should be accessible to all – UKRI

“UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) new open access policy is based on one simple principle, that findings from publicly-funded research should be accessible to all. The policy was published in August 2021 and comes into effect on 1 April….

After wide-reaching and measured consultation we are setting that key requirement for journal articles, while addressing other issues including:

constraining costs (and increasing our funding to pay our way)
supporting multiple routes for both publishers and authors
aligning with other key funders such as Wellcome and the European Commission to simplify publishing for our authors.

Without preempting future decisions on research assessment, our funding body colleagues have committed to being no stricter on open access than the UKRI policy, again simplifying choices for authors.

 

This is a reset, but one that follows on naturally and very simply from Finch as we abolish embargoes and target the use of UKRI funds to avoid increased costs. In essence, it is as simple as no embargoes, no hybrid payments….”

From Finch to Plan S: and you may ask yourself, well how did I get here?

Collection launched: 06 Mar 2019

The Finch Report reaches the grand age of seven this year, and with the advent of Plan S, Insights wanted to commemorate the progress and the frustration with open access (OA) and open science with a special collection.

We have gone through the catalogue of previously published articles to give an interesting overview of what has been happening at the coalface since the Finch report. Post Finch, Sykes suggested that ‘there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of open access’. The bigger picture that emerges from the articles is certainly that a great deal of effort and compromise have brought us to a place much closer to the end-game than we were back in 2012. However, as the various articles show, there is a great diversity of thought on how to get to where we think we ought to be. There is a value in healthy debate, particularly when there is the benefit that OA can bring. In the days leading up to the Plan S announcement, articles in Insights signalled a more urgent tone (Earney, 2018; Lundén, Smith and Wideberg, 2018) as things were not moving fast enough in navigating the bumpy golden road towards OA (Otegem, Wennström and Hormia-Poutanen, 2018). This is something that cOAlition-S explicitly targeted. Finally, Johnson (2019) brings the special collection to a close with a round-up of the immediate aftermath post Plan S. Like you, we await the next chapter….”

A change of plan for UK open access? | Wonkhe | Policy Watch

“So for me the headline advice expected in a report to the minister from Adam Tickell is that the current ‘preference for Gold OA is expensive – and there is a need for clarity as to whether the UK should maintain this approach….’ 

The fact that Gold OA comes at a cost is a clear disincentive for many researchers despite being a REF requirement – especially where a grant may not cover publication costs or where interesting work is being carried out without a grant. The research councils currently provide block funding for APCs, but this is unlikely to be a permanent feature – we might see a short extension, but only if the Gold OA policy direction continues.

If it does, and if we assume that current price trends and publishing patterns continue – and that OA take-up in the UK were to reach 100% by 2025 – total expenditure would rise to £362m in 2020, and £818m in 2028 – over three times the 2016 figure in real terms. We understand there’ll be some economic modelling published alongside Tickell’s advice, which looks at these figures across a variety of scenarios….”

Plan S: how important is open access publishing? | Times Higher Education (THE)

Dislike of gold open access is also partly responsible for researchers’ opposition to Plan S. Lynn Kamerlin, professor of structural biology at Uppsala University, is one of the instigators of the open letter against it. While she pledges strong support for open access, she is happy with the current rate of progress and sees the recent “explosion” in the use of preprint servers as illustrative of the range of routes towards it. She fears that the details of Plan S’ “embargo requirements and repository technical requirements…are so draconian that paid-for gold becomes the easiest way to fulfil them”. This will convert the “nudges” towards gold in existing funder mandates (which she supports) into a “shove”, which will be “a disaster for the research community” because it will disadvantage those unable to pay article processing charges and “seriously jeopardise the much more rigorous quality control standards provided by high-quality society journals compared to the high-volume for-profit business model, which has an inbuilt conflict of interest”.

Nor is Kamerlin alone in expressing a concern that the allegedly lower standards of peer review practised by fully open access journals have compromised quality. But, for Suber, debating quality rather misses the point. “Yes, there is some low-quality open access work, but there’s also low-quality subscription journal work, and people who step back [to see the bigger picture] always acknowledge that,” he says. “Quality and access are completely independent of each other. Open access isn’t a kind of peer review, it’s a kind of dissemination.”

However, he agrees with Kamerlin that the “green” form of open access, whereby academics post work that is in subscription journals on their institutional repositories or elsewhere…is another good option….”

Open and Shut?: The OA Interviews: Peter Mandler

“To date, much of the public debate [about Plan S] has focussed on the implications for scientists. Yet the impact on Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) scholars looks likely to be more profound.

The implications for HSS journals and learned societies are of particular concern, and there are real fears that the rules that will be applied to journals (including compulsory CC BY) will be extended to books too – a move that is felt would be entirely inappropriate. cOAlition S has yet to issue guidance on this but has said that it plans to do so. To add to the concern, earlier this year it was announced that to be eligible for the 2027 REF long-form scholarly works and monographs will have to be published OA. Monographs are key vehicles for HSS scholars to communicate their research.

 

What is particularly frustrating for UK-based HSS scholars is that Plan S looks set to rip up the settlement that was reached in the wake of the 2012 Finch Report. Wounds that had begun to heal will be re-opened.

 

As Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, puts it in the interview below, “[I]t’s as if we haven’t had the five years of post-Finch arguments! We’re just going to have to have them all over again.”

 

For a sense of the challenge Plan S poses for HSS scholars please read on….”

What does it cost to publish a Gold Open Access article?

“Folks, we have to have the vision to look beyond what is happening right now in our departments. Gold OA does, for sure, mean a small amount of short-term pain. It also means a massive long-term win for us all.”