Open Access News from the RSP team

The government would like to see more publishers take up schemes that waive open access publishing fees for researchers from universities that subscribe to its journals, a senior civil servant has said.

"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."

"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."

"...[T]he government, or to be more specific, the universities minister, David Willetts, is planning to promote and push Open Access even further."

"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."

"The recommendations of Dame Janet Finch in relation to ‘open access’ (OA), seem to represent the first steps in what looks to be an inexorable trend towards a major reform of academic publishing. "

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.