UK Research Council calls for Open Access (CHE)

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

>From today's Chronicle of Higher Education update:

British Research Group Calls for More-Liberal Open-Access Policy Than NIH 
Supports

By AISHA LABI

London

The umbrella organization for Britain's public research institutions
issued a draft policy on Tuesday that strongly endorses free and prompt
public access to research they have sponsored. The draft calls for
publications that result from work financed by Britain's research councils
after October 1 to be put in an open-access repository "at the earliest
opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication, in
accordance with copyright and licensing arrangements."

The proposal was published by Research Councils UK, commonly known as the
RCUK, a partnership formed by Britain's eight government-financed research
councils. The councils represent scientists as well as researchers in
engineering, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Interested parties, such as academics, publishers, and learned societies,
now have through August to weigh in on the draft proposal, which its
authors acknowledge is just a first step toward a comprehensive approach
to open access.

"It is an evolving policy, and this is just a starting point," said Astrid
Wissenburg, a historian on the Economic and Social Research Council and
the interim head of a committee that formulated the draft policy. "We felt
it was time for us to take a position and encourage open and easy access
to research output for everyone."

"The purpose of the policy is really to encourage scientists and
researchers in the U.K. to deposit materials in archives when they have a
right to do so," Ms. Wissenburg said. "If they have signed an agreement
with a publisher that either restricts them completely or gives a time
restriction -- for example, if the publisher says they are only allowed to
deposit their work in six months -- then they can wait six months. So the
phrase 'at the earliest opportunity' means when someone is legally allowed
to do so. We're not overruling any agreement publishers have in place with
authors."

[SNIP]

Ms. Wissenburg conceded that the RCUK exception -- allowing for delay
because of copyright and licensing restrictions -- might create an
incentive for publishers to begin imposing such restrictions on authors,
as a way of dictating when their work could be placed in open-access
repositories.

[SNIP]

Another element of the RCUK draft that will come under scrutiny during the
public-comment period is a phrase that says there is "no obligation to set
up a repository where none exists at present."

Michael Fraser, coordinator of the Research Technologies Service at the
University of Oxford, said that language is a way of letting institutions
off the hook for the responsibility of establishing open-access
repositories. He would rather see a policy that encourages recipients of
public funds to spend part of that money on setting up and running an
institutional repository.

[SNIP]

copyright 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education