Stevan summarises the current situation on UK OA policy very well. It is surprising after almost six months of criticism of the Finch Report that there has been so little defence of the Finch/RCUK/BIS position and (to my knowledge) no response to the criticism voiced. Of all the parties involved, RCUK have been the most communicative in defending their policy, although largely repeating the Finch Group’s position. I have only seen one e-mail from one member of the Finch Group (Martin Hall of Salford University) explaining his personal position. There has been no response at all from HM Government, although BIS civil servants must be monitoring the blogs and lists and the articles by Paul Jump in “Times Higher Education”. I myself have addressed three e-mails to Rt Hon David Willetts MP through a message system on the BIS web-site for those taxpayers who “want to get in touch with a BIS Minister”, receiving no reply to any of the three messages within the 15 working days promised. He is a busy man, no doubt, but the failure of BIS civil servants to send even an acknowledgement illustrates the determination of UK Government to ignore any criticism.
Equally surprising is the lack of any dialogue with journal publishers. Are not those smaller OA publishers who must have been hoping that the UK Government policy would give them a bigger share of public expenditure on academic journals not wondering whether the goldmine is a mirage? We rarely hear anything to do with business models from the big international STM publishers. Are they feeling secure in the knowledge that libraries will continue to pay high prices for big licensing deals even if insufficient money is available to pay for all APCs? One of the benefits from OA to research publication is that OA enables a broader dialogue on the outcomes from academic research than is possible in a toll-access publication system, enabling other researchers to comment on published research and taxpayers to see the results from the research they have funded. It is sad that no such dialogue appears to be allowed on the policy to implement OA in the UK. Fred Friend Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk From: Stevan Harnad Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 3:17 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum ; Lib Serials list Subject: [GOAL] The UK Gold Rush: "A Hand-Out from the British Government" Re: "Finch access plan unlikely to fly across the Atlantic" (Times Higher Education, 6 December 2012) It's not just the US and the Social Sciences that will not join the UK's Gold Rush. Neither will Europe, nor Australia, nor the developing world. The reason is simple: The Finch/RCUK/BIS policy was not thought through. It was hastily and carelessly cobbled together without proper representation from the most important stake-holders: researchers and their institutions, the providers of the research to which access is to be opened. Instead, Finch/RCUK/BIS heeded the lobbying from the UK's sizeable research publishing industry, including both subscription publishers and Gold OA publishers, as well as from a private biomedical research funder that was rather too sure of its own OA strategy (even though that strategy has not so far been very successful). BIS was also rather simplistic about the "industrial applications" potential of its 6% of world research output, not realizing that unilateral OA from one country is of limited usefulness, and a globally scaleable OA policy requires some global thinking and consultation. Now it will indeed amount to "a handout from the British government" -- a lot of money in exchange for very little OA -- unless (as I still fervently hope) RCUK has the wisdom and character to fix its OA mandate as it has by now been repeatedly urged from all sides to do, instead of just digging in to a doomed policy: Adopt an effective mechanism to ensure compliance with the mandate to self-archive in UK institutional repositories (Green OA), in collaboration with UK institutions. And scale down the Gold OA to just the affordable minimum for which there is a genuine demand, instead of trying to force it down the throats of all UK researchers in place of cost-free self-archiving: The UK institutional repositories are already there: ready, waiting -- and empty. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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