My response is posted here: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/uk-house-of-lords-short-enquiry-into.html
Highlights The long-term leadership of the UK and the House of Lords in open access is acknowledged and applauded. It is recommended that researchers always be required to deposit work in UK based repositories, even when publishing work in open access venues, to ensure that UK funded research never becomes unavailable or unaffordable to people in the UK. My research delves into mapping open access with the Creative Commons licenses, finding that, despite superficial similarities, the CC licenses are useful tools but no CC license is synonymous with open access and each license element has both useful and negative implications for scholarship. For example, allowing derivatives and commercial uses to anyone downstream will not always be compatible with research ethics requirements. A participant in a weight loss study giving permission to use a photo for a scholarly journal cannot be assumed to have granted permission for anyone to use this photo in a commercial advertisement. I recommend replacing the requirement that funded articles use the CC-BY license with a statement that when RCUK funds for open access publishing are used, there should be no restrictions placed on educational or research uses of the works. As an open access advocate, I recommend against block funding for open access article processing fees, as this will interfere with the market, raising prices that will result in loss of support for this approach outside the UK, disadvantaging the very publishers who think that this approach will benefit them. Instead, I recommend that the UK follow the policies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Canada’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research in allowing researchers to use their research grants to pay open access article processing fees. I suggest providing some funding to provide infrastructure and support and/or subsidies to assist scholarly society publishers, a common practice at university libraries throughout North America, and I further recommend that the UK set aside some seed funding to fund the future, that is, the next generation of scholarly communication, overlay journals built on institutional repositories, an area where the UK is well positioned to play a leadership role. Finally, I present some data of relevance to the question of maximum permissible embargoes before works can be made open access. It can be argued that a new norm of scholarly journals providing free back issues on a voluntary basis, typically within a year of publication, has emerged in the past ten years. This is such a widespread and growing practice that the lack of evidence of harm to these journals is in itself evidence that a one-year’s embargo causes no harm to journals relying on subscriptions, even when all articles in the journal are made freely available. Therefore I suggest that it would be quite appropriate to set a maximum embargo of no more than one year regardless of discipline. Thank you very much for the opportunity to participate in this consultation. best, Heather Morrison, PhD Freedom for scholarship in the internet age https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
