Open Access for UK and Horizon2020 publications
In June 2012 a UK working group of scientists, funding agencies and publishers made available a report on “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications”.
This work, known as the Finch report after the chairwoman of the group, Janet Finch, made the recommendation for a larger implementation of open access models in the UK publishing scene. The Finch report has very rapidly triggered a decision of Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for Britain’s seven research councils, to follow the proposed route of Gold Open Access, which makes publications freely available to everybody, publication charges being paid by the author(s) upon acceptance of the manuscript.
RCUK will set aside 1 to 1,5% of its actual budget to cover these expenses, giving dedicated “block grants” to the large research institutions. RCUK still allows publication in journals that do not offer the Gold Access, under condition that upon publication in a subscription-funded journal a raw version of the results is deposited in a freely accessible “green” repository.
Britain’s decision was almost immediately followed by a similar proposal of the European Commission, reserving a fraction of the €80 billion budget foreseen in the Horizon 2020 program. This decision did not come as a surprise, as Europe has already successfully run the pilot project OpenAIRE on this issue. The green-gold models put forward by RCUK and the EC also contain a variable embargo period of 6 to 12 months.
Implementation of the process has to be done very carefully, in particular in the actual context of constant (or declining) research budgets confronting a permanently growing number of publications.
The proposed author-pays model is a much-discussed issue, as its inherent paradigm in the selection process may result in a downward pressure on the scientific quality of journals.
For a detailed discussion, see e.g. the EPS position paper on Open Access.
