Open Access News

Last week the London-based Royal Society became the latest scholarly publisher to express grave concern over plans by Research Councils UK (RCUK) to mandate publicly-funded researchers in Britain to put their research papers on the Web. With irate publishers on one side, and a sceptical government on the other, will the RCUK be able to push through its radical proposals?...How seriously should we treat [the RS's] apocalyptic claims? Not very, it seems. As Harnad pointed out, the RCUK proposal is not intended to stop researchers from using traditional subscription-based journals; nor does it propose they abandon the peer review process: the aim is simply to improve the research process — by ensuring that scholarly papers are freely available on the Web, rather than locked behind the financial firewalls imposed by journal subscriptions....Moreover, he added, claims that self-archiving poses any kind of financial threat to traditional journals simply cannot be substantiated: despite 15 years of self-archiving by physicists, for instance, there is to date no evidence whatsoever that subscriptions to physics journals have been negatively impacted. All in all, concluded Harnad, it was "Not a proud day in the annals of the Royal Society."...But will this stream of dire predictions and gloomy prognostications [from the RS, ALPSP, and STM] derail the RCUK plan? Or will the rebuttals of OA advocates successfully neutralise them? Undoubtedly OA stalwarts can out-argue their critics....The OA movement has also become increasingly adept at managing the press (and many journalists now monitor the AmSci mailing list)....But while OA advocates are clearly more than effective at publicly countering the self-serving arguments of publishers, can they prevent the RCUK proposal from being throttled in the womb? For the bigger challenge confronting the OA movement is the continuing scepticism of the British Government — specifically, the mandarins that inhabit the Department of Trade & Industry, and their boss Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who are responsible for science and innovation in the UK....To the disgust of scholarly publishers and, no doubt, the surprise of the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry], [the RCUK proposal] called for mandatory self-archiving, and proposed introducing the mandate in October. Faced with increasingly hysterical criticism from publishers, and no doubt growing pressure from the DTI, however, the final announcement of the policy was later delayed until November. And as the temperature has continued to rise, so the timetable has continued to slip. A final announcement is not now expected before next year....Rather than waiting for its "experts on the research community" to arrive at a policy framework, Lord Sainsbury's comments would appear to imply that the DTI has taken a very hands-on approach to the matter. Certainly this remains the view of the Science & Technology Committee. "When the inquiry was running, the Committee very much shared your suspicion that DTI was pulling the strings on open access publishing — not RCUK," comments a former clerk in the Science &Technology office. "I'm not aware that the situation has changed since then. [In fact] anecdotally the same problems are still occurring."...But jousting with publisher apologists in an online forum is one thing; affecting what happens in the offline world is another. The problem facing the OA movement is that Lord Sainsbury and the DTI appear still to be highly sceptical about the merits of Open Access. Will they eventually give way to the inevitable? While RCUK is currently reluctant to discuss progress, privately insiders say that they remain hopeful that they can implement a mandate, in some shape or form. They concede, however, that their work is being hampered by the lobbying efforts of publisher organisations, particularly the ALPSP....So what do we learn from this protracted and painful process? What seems clear is that the DTI has only been listening to one side of the debate. Whether this is because it simply doesn't want to hear the other side, or whether the OA movement has failed to communicate its message effectively we don’t know. It may be that the OA movement has spent too much time rebutting publisher criticism, rather than directly lobbying the DTI — which is, after all, the ultimate power broker here.