Open Access FEATURE RCUK and HEFCE Policy on Open Access
The Research Councils have had policies on Open Access since 2005, but following a report from UK Government’s ‘Finch Group’, a working body tasked to expand access to published research, the councils updated mandates in line with evolving political policies.
As part of the updated 2013 policy, peer- reviewed articles and conference proceedings, that acknowledged funding from a research council, are expected to be published in journals that provide immediate, unrestricted and online access to the final published
Aiming to assess the impact the OA policy is having on education organisations and publishers, the review outlined key areas that needed more support or attention. These included administration and implementation costs, compliance monitoring as well as communication between the research councils and communities, and confusion over creative commons licence requirements. At the same time, HEFCE’s policy – which comes into force April 2016 – has recently been amended to reflect research community
‘Without a doubt, costs have been a key sticking point’
concerns. For example, while the policy requires that research outputs be deposited in a repository upon acceptance for publication, information systems are not yet in place to do this, so this requirement has been shifted back to April 2017. As Thorley highlights: ‘Many issues arise from trying to make this open access policy work at scale... we’re gearing up the whole sector to ensure the majority of papers are available in the open access corpus.
‘So the biggest issue has been how do you turn a practical open access policy into something that actually works, is do-able and doesn’t take up endless resources,’ he adds.
Costs count Without a doubt, costs have been a key sticking point to the implementation of both the RCUK and HEFCE open access policies. Late last year, UK-based research funding and policy consultancy, Research Consulting, unveiled its report, Counting the cost of Open Access.
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version of the paper. In addition, the journal publisher must allow immediate deposit of this final version of work in repositories without restriction on re-use.
Meanwhile HEFEC policy demands that journal articles and conference proceedings must be available in an open-access form to be eligible for the next REF. In practice, this means that final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be uploaded to an institutional or subject repository. This deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection.
Commissioned by London Higher and
SPARC Europe, the report outlined the total cost of implementing each policy, and the figures weren’t small.
The total cost to implement RCUK open access policy in the 2013/2014 academic year came in at £9.2 million. But factor in a £11 million expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) and this figure rose sharply to some £20 million.
Meanwhile the cost to the higher education sector of meeting HEFCE’s deposit requirements of the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework was estimated at £4m to £5m per annum. These figures excluded the costs of management, advocacy and infrastructure development, expected to be on par with RCUK figures for the same. Interestingly, the report also shed light on the administrative costs of making articles open access through ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes. Following gold was estimated to cost £81 per article and take two hours while green open access would cost £33 and take just over 45 minutes (see Green or Gold?, overleaf). Jisc is tackling the issue of OA costs head on. The UK-based provider of research software has been heavily involved with open access policies from the beginning, collaborating with myriad research organisations to create tools and services to manage OA processes efficiently and cost-effectively. Crucially, following the RCUK and HEFCE policies, Jisc also set up its ‘Open Access good practice initiative’ to help institutions comply with OA policies. Here, the company works with UK universities, across a series of so-called Pathfinder Projects, to discover what works, and what doesn’t (see ‘Meet the Pathfinder projects’).
As Sarah Fahmy, manager of the Jisc’s OA
good practice initiative, highlights: ‘One of our main outputs is there really is no standard one size fits all for these institutions. ‘Sometimes institutions want a straight answer to the issues and we’re not quite at that point yet, but we have lots of examples of good practice,’ she says. According to Fahmy, a pathfinder project headed up by Bath University set out to unravel the costs associated with managing a gold route for RCUK-open access funded research. The team created a functional cost analysis of the workflows and related labour costs for this route’s article processing charges (APCs), identifying areas of inefficiency.
‘Other institutions can now look at this and see whether or not they can replicate, or streamline, their processes around this,’ says Fahmy.
Likewise, a second project led by Northumbria University has developed a shareable cost modelling tool that institutions can use to model difference OA scenarios to make more informed decisions on funding policies. ‘Each pathfinder project is trying steadily to put together a piece of this puzzle,’ adds Fahmy. ‘Levels of open access implementation vary from institution to institution... and this programme is really trying to find something for everyone.’
Indeed, as other projects reveal, costs are not the only issue. So far, the Pathfinder projects
Meet the Pathfinder projects
l Coventry University: O2OA; impacts of OA implementation
l Oxford Brookes University: Making sense of OA
l Northumbria University: Optimising Resources to Develop a Strategic Approach to OA
l University of Hull: HHuLOA; focus on good practice
l University of Manchester: opeNWorks; producing toolkits, workshops and a conference
l University of Glasgow: E2EOA; OA metadata management
l University of Bath: Reducing admin costs l University College London: Advocacy, publication management and data investigation
l University of Edinburgh: Provision and management of OA services
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