During May and June 2008 JISC conducted two surveys, one sent to 160 UK HEIs and the other to 4055 biomedical authors, to investigate the situation regarding the payment of publication charges to journal publishers for articles to be available on open access....The surveys were supported by the JISC Scholarly Communications Group and undertaken in collaboration with the RIN/UUK Working Group on the Payment of Open Access Publishing Fees. Representatives from the Society for Endocrinology, the publisher BioMed Central and the Wellcome Trust who are members of the RIN/UUK Group assisted JISC in sending the survey form request to their authors and grantees....Some of the key results from the surveys are given in bullet-form below.
Author survey key findings ...
72% of the responding authors have published in a fully-OA journal in the last five years, 64% in a hybrid OA journal during the same time-period.
Of all authors who have published an article in a journal in the last five years 43% have on at least one occasion paid an OA publication charge, and 47% have had to pay colour charges or other charges to a publisher of a subscription journal.
Of those responding authors employed by an HEI, 43% stated that their HEI has an OA policy, 20% that it does not, and 36% do not know, while 31% feel that their HEI has a policy that encourages OA publication by its staff.
Asked whether their employer has an OA fund, 16% replied “yes at a central level”, 4% “yes at a Faculty level”, 4% “yes at a departmental level”, while 40% replied “no OA fund” and 36% “do not know”.
12% of responding authors acknowledged a restriction upon the use of grant funding for OA – of which the most common restriction mentioned was use during the lifetime of the research grant – but 39% felt that there are no restrictions and 48% “do not know”....
25% of responding authors feel that their employing institution assists in accessing a research funder’s OA grant, 38% feel that the assistance is not there, and 37% “do not know”.
UK Higher Education Institution survey key findings ...
23 institutions stated that they have an OA policy, 34 do not and 4 were unsure.
5 institutions mandate OA, 13 encourage it, 10 allow it, and 1 discourages it.
6 institutions have a central OA fund, 4 have a School or Faculty or Departmental OA fund.
All 10 Russell Group institutions responding claim to be dealing with the payment of OA publishing fees.
Of the 55 institutions which responded that they do not have an OA fund, 11 responded that they are likely to set up an OA fund in the future, 21 responded “not very likely”, and 4 “not at all likely”.
44 responding HEIs allow researchers to make an application for OA publication charge funding up to the point of publication, 9 after publication, but 15 allow no application for funding and 21 “do not know”.
15 of the 46 institutions allowing applications will authorise a purchase order “within a few days”.
Asked about any restriction upon use of a research grant for OA publication charges, 5 institutions acknowledged restrictions (of which for 2 the reason given is “limited by the availability of funding”), 47 responded that there are no restrictions, and 9 “do not know”.
Asked about including OA publication charges in FEC [full economic costing] calculations, 8 institutions replied that they do this, 21 replied “no”, and 13 replied “planning to do so in the future”.
17 of the 61 responding institutions believe that no member of their research staff has used a research grant for the payment of OA publication charges over the past 12 months but 16 institutions estimate up to 99 instances and 4 institutions estimate over 500....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
