The revised RCUK OA mandate has some positive and negative points:

(+1) It is now clear that the RCUK author is free to choose either Green or Gold (despite RCUK's preference for Green). 

(-2) No Green compliance-monitoring nor consequences for non-compliance (only Gold-uptake-monitoring).  

(-3) Deposit need not be immediate (can wait till end of OA embargo).

(-4) Deposit need not be in institutional repository (hence institutions not engaged to monitor and ensure compliance).

(-5) Deposit can be done by publisher instead of author (hence compliance monitoring even more uncertain).

(+6) The proposed HEFCE/REF mandate to deposit in institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for eligibility for REF, if adopted, will help remedy some of RCUK mandate's shortcomings on ensuring compliance.

HEFCE/REF is urged to adopt its proposed mandate

RCUK is urged to further revise its mandate to make it compatible with the proposed HEFCE/REF mandate: 

require immediate-deposit
of the author's refereed final draft
in the author's institutional repository
immediately upon acceptance for publication
regardless of whether or how long open access to the deposit is embargoed
and regardless of whether the journal is Gold OA or subscription-based
(institutional deposits can be automatically harvested/imported/exported to central repositories)
(repositories' email-eprint-request Button can facilitate Almost-OA during embargoes)

Universities and research institutions as well as other research funders are also urged to adopt or modify mandates to require verifiable immediate-deposit of all journal articles published by their researchers, in all disciplines.

Once this complementary funder/institutional Green OA mandate model is globally adopted, universal OA will soon follow.

Stevan Harnad

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:56 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder@btinternet.com> wrote:

Research Councils UK (RCUK) has today (6 March 2013) published the latest version of its guidance for its revised Policy on Open Access, which comes in to effect on 1 April 2013.

 

This latest version draws the policy and the guidance together into one document and aims to give researchers, research organisations as well as publishers further clarity on the implementation of the policy.

 

RCUK is keen to continue to engage with its stakeholders on the development of the guidance, so is inviting organisations to provide further input to this version where aspects may still not be clear. RCUK will then revise the guidance further to take into account these clarifications.

 

More here: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130305.aspx

 

The document is available (as a pdf file) here: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicyandRevisedguidance.pdf

 

 

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