A very long post a long time ago covered the start of this subject upon which so many hopes were pinned, hopes that the results of publicly funded UK research would be made openly accessible online. As well as being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, the researcher would place a copy of the research in a digital repository accessible online to all - a process termed ’self-archiving’. Many UK research establishments are setting up these ‘institutional respositories’ - for example our very own DSpace@Cambridge. Eventually, if this happened, any research could be found and freely accessed online - irrespective of whether your establishment subscribed (or could afford to subscribe) to the publishing journal.
We have been waiting since last October for the outcome to the Research Councils UK (RCUK) draft policy on access to research. The original draft policy, issued on 28 June 2005 - exactly one year ago from the new announcement - stated:
“From 1 October 2005*, subject to copyright and licensing arrangements, a copy of any published journal articles or conference proceedings resulting from Research Council funded research should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder. Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.” [The asterisked addition reads: “* Date to be amended on release of final Position Statement”]Unfortunately, it seems that the eight separate research councils which make up the RCUK could not reach an agreement. The final result, after all this time, is that each funding council will be left to decide its own policy. As Peter Suber notes in the latest issue of his excellent and highly rated Open Access Newsletter:
“On June 28, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy, one year to the day after it released a draft policy for public comment. The new policy is not as strong as the draft, but is nevertheless a very significant step forward that will mandate OA [open access] to a good portion of publicly-funded research in the UK.“The draft policy mandated OA for all RCUK-funded research, but the new policy lets each Research Council go its own way. There are already signs that they will diverge. Of the eight Research Councils, some will take a few months to finish their deliberations, one will take at least until 2008, one has chosen to request rather than require OA, and three have chosen to mandate OA.”
The RCUK position on issue of improved access to research outputs provides links to the policy of each individual research council - some have yet to make up their minds. Only three of the eight have so far decided to mandate Open Access to the research they fund:
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) - ‘deposit required’
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - ‘deposit mandatory in specified repositories’
- Medical Research Council (MRC) - ‘deposit required’
“…world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
A new SHERPA JULIET web site is keeping tabs on the situation with each Research Council. JULIET is a sister site to the original SHERPA RoMEO site which monitors the policies of journal publishers towards researchers self-archiving a copy of their published paper in freely accessible online repositories [RoMEO stood for Rights MEtadata for Open archiving, JULIET is not an acronym as far as I can see]. Interestingly, as the RoMEO site shows, the vast majority of publishers - around 80% - already allow self-archiving of research papers!. The problem is that, without it being mandated it seems that only around 15% of researchers will take the minimal trouble of making the few extra keystrokes to upload a copy of their paper to their institution’s repository.
Stevan Harnad, a leading advocate of open access via self-archiving in an institutional repository, and whose opinion on OA developments is always worth reading, writes Fixing the few flaws in the RCUK self-archiving mandates by pinning down WHEN and WHERE to deposit, 30 June 2006 (Stevan Harnad) in his weblog Open Access Archivangelism.
The open access material already available can be found by the standard web search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Search. However, specialized search engines such as Elsevier’s Scirus, OAIster, Google Scholar or Microsoft’s new Windows Live Academic search attempt to confine their results to academic material including much that is openly accessible in digital institutional repositories.
Other links:
JISC: JISC welcomes RCUK’s statement on access to research outputs.
Ths Scientist: UK research to be open access.
The Guardian: Boost for free internet access to public-funded research.
BioMed Central [UK based Open Access e-journal publisher]: BioMed Central welcomes UK research councils actions to promote open access.