Open Access News

In June 2005 the research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its draft policy for public comment on Open Access (OA) for publicly funded research. At the time the RCUK seemed poised to mandate OA across its eight research councils. On June 28th, a year later, the RCUK released its updated position paper which now only strongly encourages that a substantial portion of its funded research must be OA....

In an interview published in the Guardian, Sally Morris, chief executive, of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, which objected strongly to RCUK's original plan, described the new one as "an improvement on the previous draft, in that it allows freedom to individual research councils to reflect what is likely to be appropriate in their own disciplines".

Unfortunately it will be some time before the implementation guidelines of all of the councils will be known. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the Economic & Social Research Council ESRC have already announced that they will mandate deposit. The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) has decided to "strongly encourage" rather than mandate. A rather surprising choice given how poorly such a policy has served the National Institute of Health. The rest have elected to undergo further deliberation on their policies, with the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) stating that it is withholding it policy until 2008.

According the Steven Harnad, long time OA advocate, there are issues with the wording of these mandates. "The three RCUK self-archiving mandates though extremely timely and welcome per se, are still needlessly wishy-washy about one important thing: When the deposit should take place. Some (ESRC and BBSRC) say, vaguely, "at the earliest opportunity." Others (BBSRC) say "within six months of publication". And there is also hedging with: "depends upon publishers' agreements with their author."

One aspect of the new policy that seems problematic is that "Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. The research councils' position is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies."

"My guess is that it does defer to publishers but only as long as they "maintain the spirit of their current policies" --presumably by allowing OA deposits and keeping embargoes in the present range," observes Peter Suber, author of Open Access News. "If this is right, then how will the RCUK decide when publishers violate this spirit? How obstructive must publishers become before the RCUK puts the public interest ahead of their economic interests?"