Tag Archives: RCUK
RCUK changes open-access guidance yet again
The re-revised guidance still contains the government-endorsed “decision tree” articulating the Publishers’ Association’s understanding of the policy’s open access options. However, it adds that the choice of green or gold “remains at the discretion of the researchers and their research organisations”. The Publishers Association have previously insisted that the decision tree entails that the gold route must be chosen when funding is available.Times Higher Education.
Open access and the humanities: reimagining our future
Although the open access movement has been going strong for 10 years and has had good take-up in certain scientific disciplines, such as physics, the humanities currently lack the infrastructure and funding mechanisms needed to support the transition period triggered byRCUK’s (Research Councils UK) mandate.The Guardian Higher Education Network.
Publishers Have A New Strategy For Neutralizing Open Access — And It’s Working
This seems to be the publishers’ new strategy against open access: not to fight it directly, but to use constant lobbying to inflict a kind of death by a thousand cuts — slicing off a provision here, lengthening an embargo there, pushing implementation further and further into the future — until the final result is almost no different from the status quo.Blog entry on TechDirt.
Impact Factors — Letter to RCUK
Following my post of last week asking RCUK to include in the guidelines on their new open access policy a statement disavowing the use of impact factors in assessing funding applications, I wanted to thank everyone who registered their support. I also wanted to provide the text of the letter that was sent yesterday to Alexandra Saxon, RCUK’s Head of Communications. All the signatories are listed below.Stephen Curry’s Blog.
Are Some Current Open Access Mandates Backfiring on the Intended Beneficiaries?
The OA bargain is becoming a bit more fraught as more people get involved and as founding concepts are stress-tested by practical matters. If the OA movement remains dogmatic about the details, and is not willing to compromise or improve on ideas established years ago and never thoroughly validated on a large scale, it run some serious risks of losing support in the wider world.Times Higher Education.
Implementing the UK Open Access policy: The embargoes for Green
Anyone who has been tracking the rapid transition from the recommendations of the Finch Group to the emergence of RCUK’s policy must admit that the horse-trading around OA embargoes caused considerable confusion. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report into the policy published on 22 February 2013 produced this graphic to highlight how it should work.
RCUK open-access guidance revised
Longer embargo periods of up to 24 months for green open access will only apply when universities’ annual block grants for “gold” article fees have run out, Research Councils UK has confirmed.Times Higher Education.
Leading history journal editors take on the Research Councils UK
What is really needed, though, is a thorough analysis of optimum embargo periods by discipline and/or a plan for monitoring the effectiveness of different embargo periods in different disciplines.Historians revolt against RCUK’s embargo periods and the CC-BY licences which would not fit to their way research is done, they say.
Finch access plan unlikely to fly across the Atlantic
Finch access plan unlikely to fly across the AtlanticPaul Jump thinks that Report draws US notice and that experts say journals will not ‘play RCUK game’.
No hard targets for gold open access
No hard targets for gold open accessPaul Jump on the Research Council’s open access strategies:
Research Councils UK has insisted it will not punish universities that publish a lower proportion of gold open access papers than it envisaged in its allocation of block grants for article fees – provided the block grants are not misused.
See also the discussion on Implementing Finch.
Open Access — What Do Authors Really Want?
Open Access — What Do Authors Really Want?Alice Meadows, Wiley and Sons, suggests to support golden access as publishing method but votes if this would succeed for more funding especially for young researchers.
Funding seems to be a key issue, with only 18% of authors receiving full funding for article publication. Additionally, young researchers are nearly twice as likely not to have funding as their older colleagues; somewhat counter-intuitively, however, they don’t see this as any more of a barrier to publishing OA. Presumably OA will rapidly move up the ranks as a factor in where researchers choose to publish as funder mandates start to kick in – the introduction of the RCUK mandate on April 1, 2013, and corresponding increase in APC funding for articles arising from UK funded research, should be a good indicator.
RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go Gold
RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go GoldMark Thorley, NERC (Natural Environment Research Council), Head of Science Information and Chair RCUK Research Outputs Network on the Research Councils UK policies concerning open access:
Our policy requires that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.(…) So what does this mean for authors? If the journal they want to publish in only offers policy compliance through a Gold route, they must use that journal’s Gold option. (…) if a journal offers neither a Green nor a Gold compliant route, it is not eligible to take RCUK funded work, and the author must use a different, compliant, journal. (…) The Research Councils are not anti-Green and support a dual approach for delivering OA. However, we do have a strong preference for Gold, and I will explain why in my next blog post.
Clarification of the new OA policy from the RCUK
Clarification of the new OA policy from the RCUKPeter Suber on embargoes and the role of green Open Access.
See also comment on this by Stevan Harnad, who is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal,and is also Affiliate Professor in Electronics and Computer Scienceat University of Southampton, UK.
RCUK announces new Open Access policy
RCUK announces new Open Access policyResearch Councils UK (RCUK) has today, 16th July 2012, unveiled its new Open Access policy. Informed by the work of the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Professor Dame Janet Finch, the policy at once harmonises and makes significant changes to existing Research Councils’ Open Access policies.
See also blogpost on nature.com.