Open Access News from the RSP team

Research Councils UK require papers resulting from research they’ve funded to be published Open Access, preferably in journals that make papers immediately available at no charge to readers.

"The Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy on open access comes into effect from the 1st April 2013. The policy states that all peer-reviewed published research articles and conference proceedings funded by RCUK must be open access."

"The progressive RCUK policy on open access has recently come under fire, particularly from humanities scholars, for favouring Gold OA over Green."

"SPARC Europe welcomes the UK Government’s positive interest in Open Access (OA), the commissioning of the Finch report on expanding access to research publications and the Research Councils’ active engagement in developing policy."

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. In the UK, the House of Commons has asked for feedback on their Open Access Policy.

"The government wants to fund open-access research, because it knows that this has enormous economic, social and medical benefits. It doesn’t want to fund paywalled research because it knows that this achieves far less. Yet it invited paywall publishers onto the Finch Committee, and sure enough they got Green-OA embargoes and non-free licences accepted into the report’s recommendation."

"So, the new RCUK open access policy is now in play... and guess what - there's plenty of journals out there that are not accommodating it at the moment."

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has written to Research Councils UK welcoming the publication of its revised open access policy but calling for three further changes to the policy to ensure that there is absolute clarity.

From 1 April 2013, all academics funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) need to be compliant with a new open access policy.

"The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has criticised Research Councils UK (RCUK) for failures in communicating its policy on open access. In a report published on 22 February the peers recommended that RCUK clarify its guidance, communicate it more clearly, and monitor implementation"

"Academics at a seminar at the Royal Society have raised concerns over the forthcoming open access policy developed by the government and Research Councils UK."

Text mining, open data and open access publishing all hang together as the emerging future for research across a wide range of disciplines – the “Fourth Paradigm”.

"The Finch Report and RCUK’s Open Access Policy In the UK, the JISC organization has long pioneered the exploration of different models of open access and, in particular, the role of institutional repositories"