From: Frederick Friend <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:32:06 +0000

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.