Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings – the Finch Group
The Government announced on 16 July 2012 that it has accepted the recommendations of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch. The RIN provided the secretariat and drafted the report Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications, which was published on 18 June – the full report and its executive summary are attached below. The report recommended a balanced programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research, and to accelerate the progress towards a fully open access environment.
The report made clear that several different channels for communicating research results will remain important over the next few years. But it recommended a clear policy direction in the UK towards support for ‘Gold’ open access publishing, where publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication. At the same time, the report recommended extensions to current licensing arrangements in the higher education, health and other sectors; improvements to the infrastructure of repositories, and support for the moves by publishers to provide access to the great majority of journals in public libraries.
The Government response to the report accepts all the report’s recommendations and looks to the Funding Councils and Research Councils to implement them in consultation with universities, research institutions, researchers and publishers. The Government also announced in its Open Data White Paper that it is establishing a Research Transparency Sector Board to consider how to develop policy on access to research data. This follows at least in part from the analysis of issues relating to research data in the Royal Society’s report Science as an Open Enterprise.
Research Councils UK also announced on 16 July a new open access policy to come into effect for all research articles submitted for funding from 1 April 2013 that arise from Research Council funding. The policy includes new arrangements, in the form of block grants paid to UK Higher Education Institutions, approved independent research organisations and Research Council Institutes to support payment of the Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with Gold open access. Universities and other institutions will be expected to set-up and manage their own publication funds.
The Higher Education Funding Councils have announced that they are developing proposals for implementing a requirement that research outputs submitted to a REF or similar exercise after 2014 shall be as widely accessible as may be reasonably achievable at the time; and that they will consult their partners in research funding, and a wide range of other interested bodies, before finalising their plans.
The EU Commission has also announced new policies both for open access to publications and for access to data arising from research funded under Horizon 2020, the successor to Framework Programme 7 which will come into effect in 2014
Implementation of the Finch Group’s recommendations will require co-ordinated action from all the key stakeholders in the research and scholarly communications landscape. The Group itself will meet in a year’s time to review progress.
Information about the remit of the Finch Group, and minutes from its meetings, can be found here.
The Finch Group will meet again in September 2013 to review progress in the implementation of its recommendations. The RIN has been commissioned to gather evidence from key stakeholder groups in preparation for that meeting.
Finch Group report FINAL VERSION
Finch Group report executive summary FINAL VERSION
Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications by Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (‘Finch Group’) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
19 March 2013
The British Ecological Society welcomes the recognition in the Finch Report of the valuable contribution that learned societies make to the vibrant academic community within the UK, helping to ensure that the UK retains its world-leading status in research.
Information about journal acceptance rates and turnaround times provides an indicator of research which either doesn’t reach the public domain or does so too late to make an impact. A very recent survey (reviewmyreview.eu) found that the top social science journals have an acceptance rate nudging towards 5%, and one fifth of authors are reporting journal turnaround times to first decision (revise/accept/reject) of more than 110 days.
I find two issues in the report that are of concern. The first is that the Working Party seems to have given no attention at all to the model of open access publishing that delivers maximum social benefit; that is, the collaborative, subsidised model, which involves neither subscription nor author charges. This model is now used extensively by new open access journals as may be seen from the contents of the Directory of Open Access Journals. It delivers maximum social benefit, precisely because publication and access are both free – this is the only true open access, or more properly, open publishing. The costs of production are borne either by voluntary labour, or by the academic institution subsidising the work of editors and copy-editors: at present, the true costs of commercial publishing to academic institutions are unknown, since, as far as I am aware no one has carried out the research to determine how much institutions are already paying to support the work of journal editors (some have secretarial support provided by their institution, for example), members of editorial boards, and referees. If these costs were known and set against the costs of creating true openly published journals, the economic benefits of the latter would become even more obvious.
The second issue of concern is related. Why was this model not thoroughly investigated? An examination of the constitution of the Working Party might provide an answer – it contained three member of the commercial publishing industry but no one with experience of open publishing – open access, yes, open publishing, no. When the chief beneficiaries of the present system, who make profits considerably in excess of current business benchmarks, are participants in an examination of their industry, can in be wondered that no really radical model is explored? The publishing industry is the only business I know of that receives its raw material free of charge, receives financial subsidy in the editorial process from the institutions providing that raw material, and then charges excessive subscription costs to the same institutions. The technology now available renders the commercial publisher redundant in the scholarly publishing process and it is only the timidity of government and the academic institutions that prevents the development of radical alternatives.
Enhancing open access publishing is a welcome proposition to me, and I believe that it will be beneficial to many institutions and researchers in the developing world. However, passing the burden of publication costs to authors is another matter entirely. There should be consideration/ exceptions for authors who may have interesting reports but may not be able to afford the expected high APCs that will be charged by front-line journals. The pros and cons of this recommendation should be thoroughly discussed within the academic circles prior to policy formulation or implementation.
For more than ten years I have collected more than 16.000 free electronic journals in the humanities and social sciences but also in geology and mathematics.
http://www.scribd.com/Jan%20Szczepanski
I find the Finch report very encouraging and a great
leap in creating true open access.
Jan
The orientation of the report seems very much toward the sciences. For the humanities, it is problematic because it assumes university affiliations and therefore excludes independent scholars, retired academics, and in all likelihood graduate students and postdocs, part-time staff and others in ‘liminal’ positions. For those with university positions, the proposal depends on the assumption universities reallocating the ‘savings’ associated with journal subscriptions to individual academics to pay for their article costs. This might or might not happen but is unlikely to occur uniformly across institutions, creating invidious disparities between ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ institutions. The most likely scenario is that this system will be used to obligate researchers in the humanities to secure research grants in order to cover the cost of their publications. This may be the norm, effectively, in the sciences, but is very damaging in the humanities not least because the funding levels are so much less significant than in the sciences.
This whole thing seems a bit silly to me. There is essentially open access for nearly every journal via university libraries. Widen access to allow people to easily use these library resources (and perhaps require access via community libraries as well) and you have open access for anyone who is willing to leave their house. Indeed, most libraries will give members off site access, so even then, after one visit to the library, interested people can look at research from the comfort of their own home.
This should mitigate all the potential problems of forcing authors and/or funders to come up with the funds to publish their work and keep the structure of peer review and quality of journals at the status quo. (Of course there are problems with the status quo, but open access does not necessarily fix those problems!)
ALthough the principle of providing open access sounds sensible, I find the idea of passing costs onto authors a little concenring. If I have published a paper in a journal which a fellow scientist wants, all s/he need do is send me an email or a paper reprint request. My feeling is access to data is what is important.
Authors of academic papers already do the work, write the papers (we also review) for free from the publsihers point of view. We now shoudl pay them to publish our work? I’ll read the report carefully but this seems rather odd. I assume the research councils are going to fund all of this open access publishing……?