Summary: CrossRef and Publishers Licensing Society have come to a "gentleman's agreement" with RAE/HEFCE to "license" the papers that are submitted to RAE for assessment "free of charge." No such licensing agreement was necessary, however. The RAE's insistence on authors submitting the publisher's version of each paper for assessment, rather than the author's peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints) is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. Moreover, the RAE needs no special permission for its individual authors to submit their work for assessment: that is merely Fair Use on the authors' part. The RAE restriction to only four submissions per author is likewise needless and counterproductive. Once the unnecessary and wasteful "peer-re-reviewing" by the RAE panels is at last abandoned in favour of metrics, there will be no need for either a 4-item cap or any attempt to get the "originals" to the panel. The authors' self-archived postprints in their own institutional OA IRs will suffice. What will moot all of this is the OA self-archiving mandates by RCUK and the UK universities themselves, which will fill the UK universities' IRs, which will in their turn -- with the help of the IRRA (Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) -- mediate the submission of both the postprints and the metrics to the RAE.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/19/2006 12:03:00 PM.
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.
