This blog post will give you a
very brief timeline of Open Access publishing in the UK, the next post in this
series details what’s been happening with Open Access publishing at Bangor
University.
In order to highlight how long
sharing research openly has been the norm in some disciplines, let us go back
to 1991 for the advent of the online archive of free pre-prints in physics:
arXiv.org. Since 1991, over a number of
years the Open Access movement gained momentum and in 2001, 34,000 scholars
around the world signed “An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers” calling for
them to establish an online public library making research outputs in medicine
and the life sciences freely accessible.
This resulted in the establishment of the Public Library of Science
(PLOS). In 2002, the Budapest Open
Access Initiative was a gathering of scientists who signed an agreement to
preferentially publish their findings in open access journals; and in 2003, the
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
was published.
Academic libraries have been at
the forefront of promoting the Open Access movement; primarily due to
ever-increasing subscription costs from publishers coupled with decreasing
budgets from their academic institutions. But also driven by the role of
libraries in facilitating the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of wider
public good.
Since the early 2000s, we
witnessed a steady increase in the number of research outputs being published
open access by UK academics, and an increase in the number of institutional
repositories giving researchers an option for “Green Open Access Publishing”
(making an author-accepted manuscript live on the institutional repository
after a publishers embargo period has lapsed). At the end of 2007, OpenDOAR (a
quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world as
provided by SHERPA) had 1,009 repositories on the register, by July 2016 this
number has risen to 3,201 repositories worldwide (this list includes
subject-specific and institutional repositories).
In June 2012 the Finch Group
(Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by
Dame Janet Finch) published their final report which supported the case for
open access publishing through a balanced programme of action, and in
particular recommended support for the “Gold route” to open access. The UK Government accepted all
recommendations in the Finch report and asked the UK higher education funding
bodes and RCUK to put the recommendations into practice. The RCUK policy supports both Gold and Green
routes to open access, but promotes the gold route primarily with the
allocation of a block grant of funding to each UK research institution starting
in April 2013.
JISC have been successfully
supporting the sector with Open Access publishing by reaching agreements with a
number of publishers to off-set open access charges (article processing
charges/APCs) with costly subscriptions to journal packages. From October 2015,
JISC Collections and Springer reached an agreement to allow researchers in the
UK to publish their articles open access in over 1,600 Springer journals
without any costs or administrative barriers.
In April 2016 the HEFCE policy on
open access came into force, requiring researchers to make open access any
articles they want to submit to the next research assessment exercise.
References:
1.
http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/open-access-week-2011-a-short-history-of-open-access
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