From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 10:54:40 +0100

Love it or loathe it, the recently announced Open Access policy from
Research Councils UK has certainly divided the OA movement. Despite
considerable criticism, however, RCUK has refused to amend its policy.

So what will be its long-term impact?

Critics fear that RCUK has opened the door to the reinvention of the
Big Deal.  Pioneered by Academic Press in 1996, the Big Deal involves
publishers selling large bundles of electronic journals on multi-year
contracts. Initially embraced with enthusiasm, the Big Deal is widely
loathed today.

However, currently drowned out by the hubbub of criticism, there are
voices that support the RCUK policy. Jan Velterop, for instance,
believes it will be good for Open Access.

Velterop also believes that the time is ripe for the creation of a New
Big Deal (NBD). The NBD would consist of “a national licensing
agreement” that provided researchers with free-at-the-point-of-use
access to all the papers sitting behind subscription paywalls, *plus*
a “national procurement service” that provided
free-at-the-point-of-use OA publishing services for researchers,
allowing them to publish in OA journals without having to foot the
bill themselves.

Velterop’s views are not to be dismissed lightly. Former employee of
Elsevier, Springer and Nature, Velterop was one of the small group of
people who attended the 2001 Budapest meeting that saw the birth of
the Open Access movement, and he was instrumental in the early success
of OA publisher BioMed Central.

Moreover, during his time at Academic Press, Velterop was a
co-architect of the original Big Deal.

More on this, and a Q&A with Velterop, can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/open-access-in-uk-reinventing-big-deal.html