Public Clarification Needed: Does RCUK Have a Plan B?

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

        ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

    Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

    "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4308.html 

    "Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4313.html

Is the ALPSP announcement (reproduced at the end of this message from
Peter Suber's Open Access News) really true? Has ALPSP indeed been
privately promised veto/embargo power over RCUK Policy?

I very much hope the ALPSP announcement is not true, and that ALPSP is
again vastly overstating its case, because otherwise it sounds as if RCUK
has effectively agreed to make the RCUK policy conditional on whether and
when each publisher agrees. If that were true it would mean that the RCUK
self-archiving policy was even weaker than the deeply flawed NIH policy --
indeed, that the RCUK policy was no policy, mandate or requirement at all,
but merely a pointer to each publisher's policy.

The optimal RCUK policy would of course be:

    Plan A: to mandate *both* (1) depositing the full text immediately
    upon acceptance for publication *and* (2) setting full-text access
    as Open-Access immediately upon acceptance for publication.

But if RCUK feels it cannot mandate that, the next best thing is
certainly:

    Plan B: to mandate (1) depositing the full text immediately upon
    acceptance for publication and to also *strongly recommend* (2)
    setting full-text access as Open-Access immediately upon acceptance
    for publication. (Otherwise, full-text access can be set as
    Institution-Internal-Access, and external eprint requests to the
    author -- based on the immediate webwide visibility accessibility
    of the OAI metadata -- can be made and filled by email.)

Plan B would immediately remove the RCUK policy from the reach of the
ALPSP lobby completely, because only deposit would be mandated, whereas OA
access-setting would merely be recommended. Nothing else would then need
to be stipulated at all in the RCUK policy -- about publisher policy,
copyright or embargoes.

To instead build into the RCUK policy a veto and embargo power at each
publisher's discretion would be counterproductive in the extreme, not only
for the RCUK policy's capacity to provide OA to British research output,
but for its capacity to serve as a model for other nations that are
closely watching what RCUK will do, and likely to emulate it.

We need further public clarification on this from RCUK. Otherwise ALPSP's
public claim below -- if uncontested by RCUK -- to having already received
RCUK's agreement to publisher veto and embargo power over whether and when
the full-text deposit is made will cause negative ripples worldwide
through rumour alone, giving the impression that there is in fact no RCUK
self-archiving policy at all, but simply a deferral to whatever policy
each publisher may or may not happen to have on the matter.

>From Peter Suber's Open Access News:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_02_fosblogarchive.html#a112869116319287317

    ALPSP meeting with the RCUK  

   On September 16, the ALPSP met with representatives of the RCUK to
   discuss publisher objections to the draft OA policy. The ALPSP has
   publicly disclosed this much about the results of the meeting:
   http://www.alpsp.org/news/rcuk.htm

   "We are reassured that RCUK have agreed to explain to grant recipients
   why publishers might find it necessary to impose an embargo or time
   limit for deposit of articles in order to protect subscription and
   licence sales, and also to insist that such embargoes must be observed;
   we have offered to help with drafting the wording for this. We are
   also pleased to know that RCUK will be consulting publishers over
   the specification of the research which will be conducted over
   the next two years, to evaluate the likely effects of the policy
   (although papers arising from research funded after the beginning
   of 2006 are unlikely to have been published by the review date of
   2008); we hope that the research will be sufficiently objective to
   ensure that publishers do provide data about the effects, if any,
   on downloads, subscription/licence sales, and other measures of
   journal sustainability. RCUK plan to hold a workshop for societies
   in the early part of next year, and ALPSP has offered to help in any
   way that might be required."

   The ALPSP minutes of the meeting are available to members only.

   (Peter Suber: "It looks like the RCUK will not close the "copyright
   loophole" in the current draft, which allows publishers to impose
   embargoes. Instead, it may even let publishers re-word it to suit
   themselves.")

Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 10/07/2005
09:14:00 AM.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_02_fosblogarchive.html#a112869116319287317