ANALYSIS AND NEWS PUSH THE DOOR WIDER!
Moving beyond open access policy development to greater alignment and effectiveness, says Mafalda Picarra, project officer at Jisc
I
t hasn’t always been so, but here in the early 21st century people in many walks of life aspire to openness.
US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a strong advocate for transparency, has been quoted as saying: ‘When you open the door towards openness and transparency, a lot of people will follow you through,’ and in higher education that is proving to be true in many countries. As openness in the form of open access (OA) becomes recognised as a valuable means of improving knowledge transfer and speeding up the pace of progress, more and more universities, research funders and other stakeholders are developing and implementing OA policies of their own.
Institutions and funders in the UK have been in the vanguard of Europe’s OA movement. The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP), which is a searchable international database of university repositories and their contents, reveals that – of the 500-plus OA policies it has recorded globally – 113 have been developed and implemented by institutions and research bodies in the UK.
Nothing to see here?
So does that mean that all the hard work on OA has been done – in the UK, at least? Not yet. Even a cursory review of current institutional and funder OA policies reveals a few idiosyncrasies and many significant differences in approach. That’s inevitable in a transitional phase but not ideal and so, in 2012, the European Commission advocated both OA approaches to research and closer alignment of policies. This is vital if we want to support collaborative research. As researchers now work more regularly with peers in other institutions and other nations – and as OA policies proliferate – they increasingly need to comply with the policies of several different bodies, perhaps with conflicting requirements.
OA policy alignment
In the UK the policy alignment process is under way – the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE’s) OA policy is relatively aligned with the EC’s Horizon 2020 policy, and UK universities are, in turn, reviewing their own policies to bring them into line with major research funders’ OA policies. The PASTEUR4OA collaboration brings together representatives from 10 European countries to develop European expertise on open access, and fostering alignment of policies is an important aspect of that work. Over the last 12 months or so, we have produced a suite of resources designed to help universities and funders wherever they are in their transition to OA.
OA policy resources Although work on OA is relatively far advanced in the UK, there is still plenty of scope for universities to develop and
8 Research Information DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016
implement new policies and to monitor and evaluate existing ones. Resources to help with either task include a brief on open access in the UK, essentially a case study describing how OA policy has developed in the UK in the last decade. In large part it did so in response to an increasingly loud debate during the 1990s, about how to improve access to academic publications and about what were then seen as subversive ideas about alternative publishing models. It is fascinating to see how this disruptive thinking has become mainstream. The brief describes how research is funded and defines how the country’s research programmes fit into the global knowledge economy. It also looks at projects to support policy development and to test new funding and publishing models, as well as the development of institutional repositories and other infrastructure to support OA. Focused on the UK’s experience, the case study is intended to be a useful resource
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