Confusion at the RCUK

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

The RCUK new policy on Open Access, released today, is at

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/
They  essentially permit each of the component society
to establish policies on voluntary or mandated OA.
Each of them has done it differently from all he others.

Three, the Economic & Social Research Council the Biotechnology & 
Biological Sciences Research Council the Medical Research 
Council, (MRC), have mandated it, but all 3 with different 
details about choice of repository, choice of version, and 
coordination with the publisher.

Alternatively, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the 
Research Councils, has a "strongly-suggested policy," with its 
own set of details.

However, the Natural Environment Research Council is still 
working on theirs; the Particle Physics & Astronomy Research 
Council is still discussing it; the Arts & Humanities Research 
Council hopes to have a policy by the end of 2006, and, 
unbelievably, the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research 
Council has commissioned a study to be finished in 2008.

With the precedent of the earlier deciders, they will presumably 
also all be different in as many ways as possible.

There will 8 different policies to contend with, and for those in 
the ambit of the Wellcome Trust, there will be 9.

Every publisher will probably have its own set of details, mostly 
intended to be worked out to harmonize with the relevant 
societies.

Possibly, each university may also have its own. UK researchers 
will need to know and comply with, whichever combination(s) may 
be relevant. It's even worse than the different policies on 
formatting cited references.

There will be differing institutional, subject, national, 
international, and RC-specific repositories, but this should not 
cause difficulty in finding and viewing the items, because search 
programs such as OAIster should be able to harvest the metadata 
from them all.

What the reader eventually gets to read will, of course be 
slightly different, as will the time he is able to read it--some 
apparently will still have a six-month delay.

The NIH plan was one single plan, and only 2% of the authors were 
able to figure it out. For librarians, this opens up a wide new 
area for user instruction.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu