Open access mandates coming to the RCUKOn June 28, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy, one year to the day after it released a draft policy for public comment. The new policy is not as strong as the draft, but is nevertheless a very significant step forward that will mandate OA to a good portion of publicly-funded research in the UK.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #99
July 2, 2006
by Peter Suber
The draft policy mandated OA for all RCUK-funded research, but the new policy lets each Research Council go its own way. There are already signs that they will diverge. Of the eight Research Councils, some will take a few months to finish their deliberations, one will take at least until 2008, one has chosen to request rather than require OA, and three have chosen to mandate OA.
The new policy reaffirms the four principles articulated in the 2005 draft, supporting open access, peer review, cost-effectiveness, and preservation. The OA principle holds that "Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable."
Like the draft, the new policy focuses on OA archiving, not OA journals. It doesn't directly require OA archiving; instead, it requires it when the separate Research Councils require it --an unhelpful tautology. The separate Councils will decide whether to encourage or require deposit and what kind of repository to use for these deposits. The draft policy favored institutional repositories at the grantees' universities, but the new policy expresses no preference. The policy applies to conference presentations as well as journal articles, and covers the deposit of metadata as well as full-text. It doesn't exactly call for the dual deposit/release strategy, but it does ask for the deposit of metadata "[w]herever possible...at or around the time of publication" and, unfortunately, says nothing about the timing of the deposit or release of full-text. The length of the permissible delay or embargo will be decided separately by each of the Research Councils.
The policy does not tell authors where they should publish their work and is careful to preserve their freedom to publish where they like. It lets RCUK grantees use grant funds to pay article processing fees at OA journals that charge fees, but it doesn't direct grantees to submit their work to OA journals. Both halves of this rule are clear and welcome. Nevertheless, the Medical Research Council (MRC) is the only council so far explicitly willing to let grantees use grant funds for OA journal fees.
The RCUK will also launch a study of "the impact of author-pays publication and self-archiving on research publishing", starting later this year and ending in 2008. If necessary, it will revise its OA policy in light of the findings. (Yes, the RCUK still uses the misleading and harmful term "author-pays" --even when *it* is paying instead of authors.)
Finally, one vague provision of the new policy is bound to raise questions and anxieties. It says: "Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. The research councils' position is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies." This is the vague new version of the vague old provision in the 2005 draft requiring OA "subject to copyright or licensing arrangements."
If this means that the new OA policy is subordinate to the licensing terms set by publishers, which might prohibit deposit in an OA archive or demand arbitrarily long embargoes, then it perversely negates everything else in the policy. But if it means that authors must obey public copyright law and private publishing contracts, then it's superfluous. If it means something else, then it desperately needs clarification. My guess is that it does defer to publishers but only as long as they "maintain the spirit of their current policies" --presumably by allowing OA deposits and keeping embargoes in the present range. If this is right, then how will the RCUK decide when publishers violate this spirit? How obstructive must publishers become before the RCUK puts the public interest ahead of their economic interests?
In any case, there seems to be a warning here for publishers. "We're letting you use your copyright and licensing policies to protect your revenues, even at the expense of early public access to publicly-funded research, but do not abuse this privilege or...." Like an old parchment with a burnt corner, the rest is missing.
I'd like to say that this doesn't matter but I think it does. Publishers have never promised to hold embargoes, licensing terms, and access policies at their current levels. They have said over and over again that they fear that the rise of OA archiving will mean a drop in subscriptions. If it turns out to be so, or if they simply impute continuing attrition to the new OA mandates, then they will want to lengthen existing embargoes and tighten their access policies. The current vague RCUK policy allows this to an indefinite degree. The RCUK needs to draw a clearer line in the sand or develop a more articulate policy about what to do when publishers start pushing across it. If it expects no push, then I think it is seriously mistaken.
* The Medical Research Council (MRC) and Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are the early heroes in my book. They will both mandate OA to the research they fund, effective October 1, 2006. Both will require deposit "at the earliest opportunity", though the MRC adds "and certainly within six months". The MRC requires deposit in PubMed Central while the BBSRC requires deposit "in an appropriate e-print repository". Both apply their policies to agency employees as well as grantees.
http://www.mrc.ac.uk/open_access
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/articles/28_june_research_access.html
* The Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) is the only other Research Council to adopt a mandate so far, but its mandate is significantly hedged and qualified. The ESRC's "funded researchers should deposit the outputs from any research in the ESRC awards and outputs repository, where this is permitted by publishers' licensing or copyright arrangements." There are two weaknesses here. First, "should" is softer than "must" (a point of significance for Germany's DFG). Second, the "where permitted" clause takes all the teeth out of the mandate. The ESRC is mandating OA with one hand but giving publishers the power to override the mandate with the other. While the overarching RCUK policy vaguely does the same thing, the ESRC policy clarifies it in the wrong direction.
* The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) has decided to "strongly encourage" rather than require OA to CCLRC-funded research. This is a disappointing decision, repeating the mistake of the NIH. The CCLRC will undoubtedly prove what the NIH has already proved, that mere encouragement, however strong, doesn't work. The NIH tried strong encouragement but could not get compliance even up to 4%.
* The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will not even announce its policy until the completion of the RCUK's new study in 2008. This is also disappointing. Publishers have been demanding a study on the effects of high-volume OA archiving on journal subscriptions, but there's no reason for funders accede to these demands. We already know that 15 years of high-volume OA archiving in physics has not caused cancellations of physics journals. The Institute of Physics (IOP) and the American Physical Society (APS) have said so in public. The IOP and APS are so comfortable with OA archiving in their field that they both host mirrors of arXiv. Outside physics, there is no other field with high-volume OA archiving, so far, and consequently there's no empirical evidence to study. So either we use the evidence from physics, whose lessons are already known, or we *generate* evidence in other fields. But the only way to generate evidence in other fields is to increase the rate of OA archiving in those fields, something an OA mandate would do perfectly. To call for a study before the evidence exists, and as a precondition to generating the evidence, is a clear example of the political dodge of using study as a pretext for delay, and the EPSRC has bought into it. It's especially ironic that the EPSRC is the one Research Council to employ this delaying tactic when the well-known and utterly reassuring empirical evidence from physics lies in its own disciplinary domain.
* The RCUK is evidently letting the eight Research Councils go their own way because they cannot agree on a common policy. But do they disagree because they represent different disciplines? They say so, and argue that different agencies in different disciplines face different circumstances and need flexibility to respond to those differences. I support this theory, and have often written that disciplinary differences matter. But an OA mandate should apply across the disciplines, even if other policy details vary. A good model here is the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced in Congress in May. FRPAA asks federal agencies to develop their own OA policies under certain guidelines laid down in the bill, and one of those guidelines is that they mandate OA to the research they fund. In most other respects, the agencies are free to go their own way. The naturalness of this solution makes me doubt that all the in-house disagreements at the RCUK are disciplinary.
* I have two disappointments. (1) I'm disappointed that the RCUK did not adopt a uniform policy to mandate OA and that some of the Research Councils will use their discretion to adopt weaker polices. The result waters down the strong policy of the 2005 draft and is not consistent with the principle to which the RCUK says it is still adhering, that "publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use...." (2) I'm disappointed that the exception for publisher copyright and licensing policies is so vague, leaving everyone (publishers, researchers, and the RCUK) unsure what line publisher policies may not cross and how the RCUK will respond to publishers who go too far.
* But despite that, the good news here is very good. Before the new RCUK policy, there were OA mandates from private research funders (Wellcome Trust), near-mandates from public research funders (Germany), OA requests, exhortations, or non-mandates from public research funders (US, Finland), and proposed mandates for public research funders (Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, US, and the European Union). But the RCUK mandates will be the world's first OA mandates from public research funders. The BBSRC, ESRC, MRC are the first public funding agencies anywhere to take this important stance. This is a huge step forward.
Research Councils UK (RCUK) home page
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/
RCUK page on its new OA policy
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
The 2005 draft policy (note that this is a new URL)
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/2005statement.pdf
--Also see my article on it in SOAN for 7/2/05.
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3967549/suber_news87.html#rcuk
The ongoing RCUK-RIN-DTI study, Analysis of data on scholarly journals publishing
http://www.rin.ac.uk/?q=data-scholarly-journals
The RCUK workshop, Learned Societies and Access to Research Outputs, June 29, 2006
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/lswkshp.asp
* Here are the eight Research Councils, their home pages, and the pages where you can follow their evolving OA policies.
Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/about/policy/ahrc_guidance_on_access_to_research_outputs.asp
Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/articles/28_june_research_access.html
Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC)
http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/
http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/Activity/Publications;SECTION=9618
Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Support/access/
Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/AboutEPSRC/ROAccess.htm
Medical Research Council (MRC)
http://www.mrc.ac.uk/
http://www.mrc.ac.uk/open_access
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/aboutus/access
Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/oap
* Here's some news and comment on the new policy.
Leader, In praise of ... open access, The Guardian, July 1, 2006.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1810099,00.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115175802286157606
Stevan Harnad, Fixing the few flaws in the RCUK self-archiving mandates by pinning down WHEN and WHERE to deposit, Open Access Archivangelism, June 30, 2006.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/108-Fixing-the-few-flaws-in-the-RCUK-self-archiving-mandates-by-pinning-down-WHEN-and-WHERE-to-deposit.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115176139058241170
Richard Smith, Give it to me straight, doc, The Guardian, June 30, 2006.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_smith/2006/06/the_battle_to_give_the_public.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115167806754510283
BioMed Central issued a press release supporting the new RCUK policy, June 29, 2006.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20060629
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115167292216451739
Anon., Creative destruction in the library, The Economist, June 29, 2006.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7109062
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115161092914202747
Richard Wray, Boost for free internet access to public funded research, The Guardian, June 29, 2006.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1808203,00.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115160077011122216
Rod, Research Councils UK: Open Access Position Announcement, Informaticopia, June 28, 2006.
http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/2006/06/research-councils-uk-open-access.html
Anon., RCUK revised position statement on access to research outputs, Publishing Developments, June 28, 2006.
http://accidie.wordpress.com/2006/06/28/rcuk-revised-position-statement-on-access-to-research-outputs/
Heather Morrison, Research Councils U.K. Open Access Position Announcement, OA Librarian, June 28, 2006.
http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/06/reearch-councils-uk-open-access.html
Anon., British Group Retreats From Requiring Open Access to Research, Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, June 28, 2006.
http://chronicle.com/news/article/640/british-group-retreats-from-strong-support-for-open-access-to-research
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115159811424358200
Stevan Harnad, World OA Policy Sweepstakes: UK Retakes Commanding Lead, Open Access Archivangelism, June 28, 2006.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/107-World-OA-Policy-Sweepstakes-UK-Retakes-Commanding-Lead.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115159606716964158
JISC issued a press release in support of the new RCUK OA policy, June 28, 2006.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3153.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115154517541645582
Stephen Pincock, UK research to be open access, TheScientist, June 28, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23740/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115153845242320189
David Prosser's spreadsheet of the eight separate policies (as of June 28, 2006)
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3150-02-B/RC%20OA%20policies%20v11.1.xls
* Postscript. The day after the RCUK announced its new policy, SHERPA announced the launch of JULIET, a database of the OA policies adopted by various funding agencies. On the launch day, it covered the eight Research Councils of the UK, the Wellcome Trust, and the NIH, and over time it will cover more.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3154.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_25_fosblogarchive.html#115158706777219939
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