From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 17:29:04 +0100

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