RE: JISC Invitation to Tender: Open Access Publishing Initiative Round 2

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

There are probably people better placed to answer David's questions
regarding JISC funding for open access journals, but let me make an
initial attempt.

The press release announcing the first round of funding:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_openaccess_0304

explained that 'three of the four awards will mean the waiving of
submission fees for all UK HE [Higher Education] authors, while the fourth
- with the Public Library of Science - will include a 50% discount on the
first 40 papers from the UK published in PLoS journals.'

In the UK we have not had the tradition of including in grants money
specifically for publication charges (page charges or, increasingly, open
access publication charges) and so this helps UK authors who want to
publish in those open access journals that operate such a charge.  In a
similar way JISC has just renewed an agreement with BioMedCentral to cover
publication charges for their journals:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=biomed_pr_210904

Obviously, we are hoping that the UK Research Councils will pick-up on the
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recommendation that
grants do in future include specific publication funds.

On the issue of funding, JISC is a Committee supported by the Funding
Councils with a wide remit to provide 'strategic guidance, advice and
opportunities to use ICT to support teaching, learning, research and
administration'.  My impression is that they have a relatively large
degree of freedom to initiate project such as this from their general
funding and would not have had to persuade anybody external that this is a
good thing to do.  However, other may want to correct me if that is wrong.

(In passing, I should say how pleased and grateful I am that JISC has been
a strong supporter of SPARC Europe since we launched in 2002.)

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:	david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
Tel:	+44 (0) 1865 284 451
Mobile:	+44 (0) 7974 673 888
http://www.sparceurope.org