Open access and the geographical community
The move towards ‘open access’ (OA) publication of research will have far reaching effects on higher education in the UK. At present, the situation is changing rapidly and much remains uncertain.
The Society will try to keep the geographical community informed about the emerging context and support them in the transition process. As publishers, we will also do all we can to ensure our own journals are compliant with UK OA mandates, in a way that supports all the community across career stages, institutional affiliations and sub-disciplinary areas.
The Society is involved in policy discussions about the implementation of OA: Society Director, Dr Rita Gardner, was a member of the Finch Group and is on the JISC OA Implementation Group. We will consult widely on responses to upcoming consultations, notably from HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) on OA publications and the Research Excellence Framework 2020 and RCUK (Research Councils UK). This page includes a brief summary of the current situation, key documents and recent announcements, which we will keep updated.
Latest news
Following a House of Lords report (PDF) on ‘The implementation of open access’ in February 2013, HEFCE (deadline 25 March 2013) and RCUK (deadline 20 March 2013) have released updates and invited feedback on their open access policies.
Context
The UK Government, European Commission and major funders of higher education have expressed support for expanding access to research following the recommendations of the Finch Group set up by BIS (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills). Their statements will impact on the way some research is disseminated because they include requirements that much publicly funded research is made open access (freely available to all readers) and available for data mining and re-use, including commercially.
The Finch Group and BIS, followed by HEFCE and RCUK, have indicated strong support for the payment of article processing charges (APCs) to allow research to be made Gold OA – that is, all readers can freely access the published article instead of them or their institution purchasing or subscribing to it, because the APC has covered the cost of publication. Where funds to cover APCs are not available to an author, research may have to be made Green OA, which is when versions of published papers are archived in online repositories hosted by institutions or funders, for example. Publishers and funders have different rules about which version can/must be archived in this way and when.
Revised RCUK guidance in March 2013 details how in future, all outputs fully or partially funded by them will have to be available open access. From 1 April 2013, RCUK will allocate block funding grants to institutions to support payment of APCs. In September 2012 the UK Government announced £10m to be invested in 30 institutions to assist in the transition to OA.
Not all of this is new, as some funders, particularly in the US, have mandated this for some time and Green archiving has been requested by funders and institutions in the UK. There are a number of routes currently available for OA publication, including fully OA and hybrid (part subscription, part OA) journals. What is new, includes the proposed scale of the mandates; shorter embargo times in some, if not all, disciplines, which threaten some journals’ sustainability; the availability of some funding to pay APCs; the burden on institutions to administrate APC block grants; additional conditions of data-mining and the potential for commercial re-use of research.
Key statements and policies