FW: SPARC Europe Response to RCUK Access Policy

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Apologies for Cross Posting

Press Release

Leading European Library Organization firmly supports Research Councils
UK new open access policy

Policy that requires UK-funded research be deposited in openly
accessible archives will strengthen increased investment in research.
July 14, 2005

Oxford, UK.  SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition), a leading organization of European research libraries, calls
for wide support for the proposed policy released by Research Councils UK
(RCUK), the main public investor in fundamental research in the UK. The
policy, announced in June, requires Research Council grantees to deposit
the resulting research reports into openly accessible repositories in
order to speed and widen dissemination.

David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, commented, "We are currently in
the position where UK researchers cannot get easy access to all the work
of their peers, despite the vast majority of it being published online.
So, while the UK Government has greatly increased research spending, to
�2.4B for the Research Councils, the return on this investment is not
maximized. If implemented, the RCUK policy would rectify this." RCUK spent
over a year consulting universities, academic libraries, researchers, and
publishers to develop a fair, well-balanced policy that covers research
outputs in the form of journal articles or conference proceedings. SPARC
Europe encourages submission of favourable comments that support the draft
during the public comment period set to end August 31st.

According to RCUK, one of the policy's cornerstones is that *ideas* and
knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and
accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly
and effectively as practicable.  The Research Councils will therefore
require grant holders to deposit copies of any resultant published journal
articles and conference proceedings in suitable open access institutional
or subject-based repositories. These repositories are online databases
that provide an electronic archive of the research that is immediately and
openly available over the Internet. To further improve access to publicly
funded research, the Research Councils will also make funds available for
researchers to pay open access journal publication fees. While encouraging
the practice of publishing articles in open access journals, the policy
preserves academic freedom by not mandating submissions to such journals.

The academic libraries represented by SPARC Europe look forward to the
challenge of working with their academics, the Research Councils, and
publishers to maximize research impact by implementing the policy. "Many
of our members, especially in the UK, already have great experience with
running institutional repositories and there is a strong commitment to
further develop these repositories as research tools," said David Prosser.
"Ensuring access to high-quality, peer-reviewed research is one of the
central remits of the library and the new policy will enable greater
access to a wider range of research, so benefiting researchers, students,
and society in general."

The full RCUK policy, together with details of the consultation process,
can be found at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp

SPARC Europe <http://www.sparceurope.org/> is an alliance of 110
research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is
affiliated with SPARC <http://www.arl.org/sparc/> based in Washington,
D.C., which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America.
SPARC Europe and SPARC work to develop and promote new models of scholarly
communication that increase the access to and utility of the research
literature.

http://www.sparceurope.org/press_release/RCUK.htm

For more information, contact: David Prosser,
david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

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