UK Research Funders: Publicly Funded Research Must Be Publicly Available

Yeah, it could, but if you read the Finch report, you'll find that they're recommending what's known as gold open access. Researchers will be expected to pay an preposterously high per-article fee during the publication process -- a fee that they will be expected to write into their proposal for funding. This means that shedloads of funding will be going from research groups to publishers. A 2,000 UKP per publication 'article processing fee' has been proposed, although with gloomy predictability, higher-profile publishers with better impact factors have generally made it known that their article processing costs, seeing as how they're Quality and all, may (alas) be somewhat higher. They can get away with it.

This, incidentally, means that people who happen to do research and receive public funding, but don't happen to have any project funding (and this is far from rare), are going to find it very difficult to afford to publish. We're going from a situation in which the general public can't afford to access/read research to a situation in which only a subsection of academics will be able to afford to publish, thus privileging themselves on the REF (latest incarnation of the research evaluation exercise) and denying the stragglers. Publishers are content with this because they're on the gravy train for life. Many academics aren't unduly concerned because they have project funding and it's just another system of fees. And hey, screw the riffraff, right? They can stay in the low impact factor ghetto where they belong.

Open access is a good idea. This, on the other hand, is just your typical everyday lunatic you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours moneywasting. The actual solution is within the government's reach (hint: it involves privileging legit open access journals in the REF, rather than paying wodges of cash to Nature), but that won't get anyone invited to any dinner-parties at all, so we'll just keep throwing money at publishers instead.

I'm in a situation right now where my own funder both mandates open access and refuses to pay for it, which, regrettably, is the sort of laughably schitzophrenic thinking I have come to expect from them. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'They're all a load of useless bloody loonies.'

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/qlqz9-mA9hw/uk-research-funders-publicly-funded-research-must-be-publicly-available

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