My, what a lot of (pessimistic) speculation based on a survey of bioscientists’ attitudes after the RCUK policy was announced and before the new HEFCE/REF policy was announced!
I’d suggest that the speculation about which (and how many) of their journal articles UK authors will deposit at acceptance time across the upcoming six years — to ensure that they will be potentially eligible for REF2020 — may be particularly unperspicacious. Lots of conjectures about RCUK mandate compliance, but no apparent mention of the complementary university mandates that are increasingly being adopted (and especially about the HEFCE-style Liege model: immediate deposit required in order to be visible for annual performance review). Those *cover all research output, funded and unfunded*. And Liege is reporting near 90% compliance… Some apparent unawareness of how simple it already is to deposit. And still way too much talk about (Gold) OA publishing as if that were what was meant by OA, and what this is all about. Stevan Harnad On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Richard Poynder < richard.poyn...@cantab.net> wrote: > As a result of prolonged pressure from the open access (OA) movement — and > following considerable controversy within the research community — the UK > is now embarked on a journey that OA advocates hope will lead to all > publicly-funded research produced in the country being made freely > available on the Internet. > > > > This, they believe, will be the outcome of the OA mandates from Research > Councils UK (which came into effect on April 1st 2013) and the Higher > Education Funding Council for England (which will come into effect in > 2016). > > > > It has taken the OA movement twelve years to get the UK to this point (the > Budapest Open Access Initiative was authored in 2002), but advocates > believe that these two mandates have now made open access a done deal in > the country. As such, they say, they represent a huge win for the movement. > > > > Above all, they argue, HEFCE’s insistence that only those works that have > been deposited in an open repository will be eligible for assessment for > REF2020 (which directly affects faculty tenure, promotion and funding) is a > requirement that no researcher can afford to ignore. > > > > But could this be too optimistic a view? Dagmara Weckowska, a lecturer in > Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex, believes it may be. > While she does not doubt that the RCUK/HEFCE policies will increase the > number of research outputs made open access, she questions whether they > will be as effective as OA advocates appear to assume. > > > > Weckowska reached this conclusion after doing some research earlier this > year into how researchers’ attitudes to open access have changed as a > result of the RCUK policy. This, she says, suggests that open access > mandates will only be fully successful if researchers can be convinced of > the benefits of open access. As she puts it, “Researchers who currently > provide OA only when they are required to do so by their funders will need > a change of heart and mind to start providing open access to all their > work.” > > > > In addition, she says: “Under the new HEFCE policy, researchers have > incentives to make their best 4 papers accessible through the gold or green > OA route (assuming that the REF again requires 4 papers) but they do not > have incentives to make ALL their papers openly accessible.” > > > > The interview with Dagmara Weckowska can be reader here: > > > > > http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-open-access-interviews-dagmara.html > > >
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