This post may be unbelievable, so if you don't like reading unbelievable things before breakfast, delay reading further until you think you can cope with it.
Universities Australia (which is a body composed of all Australian Vice-Chancellors) has released a paper in February, entitled 'An agenda for Australian Higher Education 2013-2016'. In it the vice-chancellors express their collected intentions and wisdom regarding open access. I quote from the section subtitled 'Open access to research' on page 44: "Universities Australia believes that there is enormous public benefit in increasing access to the outcomes of all research, especially research that has been publicly funded. There are a number of logistical, practical and commercial issues that need to be addressed to achieve this goal and Universities Australia, with the support of government, is committed to making Australia's high-quality research output freely accessible to all. So far, so good. Indeed, great! Now turn to 'Actions: Expand research outreach' on p45 to see how motherhood statements become reality: "To increase the visibility of university outputs and make them more useful for the broader community, universities will include metadata on research publications in their institutional repositories.' Really? The metadata is already in the open domain. Metadata is a routine by-product of publishing. Mind you, the universities will add Socio-Economic Objective codes and Field of Research codes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics classification, which publishers don't. ".and will expand the proportion of full text publications available to 50% by 2030." 50% of what? Current annual output? 2013-2016 output? Measured how long after publication? Why 50% which is not a stable position? And 17 years into the future to achieve even this paltry target, by which time no current vice-chancellor will still be in office; indeed in some cases there will be two changes of CEO! This is just procrastination - poorly thought out, and a fob-off. One could have hoped that Universities Australia could have been more decisive. I suggest as an alternative: Universities will provide the full text of all their research publications, or a link to where such a full-text can be found, in their institutional repositories no later than the end of 2016. Compliance should be measured six months after publication in the case of biological and medical research, twelve months in the case of all other sciences, and two years in the case of humanities and fine arts. Notes: 1. This is an achievable timetable, and within the planning timeframe of the report. 2. The embargoes mirror those of the RCUK. 3. The content provision matches the requirements of the Australian research councils, except the humanities and fine arts are given some extra embargo leeway. 4. While the statement states 'all' as a target, achievement of say 95% should be regarded as acceptable by 2017. 5. The universities can then press even harder for an efficiency dividend, with the Australian Government simply harvesting data from the repositories for both HERDC (data collection) and ERA (research evaluation), and relieving themselves of unnecessary work. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia '
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