Tag: Research Councils UK

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First thoughts on the Finch Report: Good steps but missed opportunities

The Finch Report was commissioned by the UK Minister for Universities and Science to investigate possible routes for the UK to adopt Open Access for publicly funded research. The report was released last night and I have had just the chance to skim it over breakfast. These are just some first observations. Overall my impression is that the overall direction of travel is very positive but the detail shows some important missed opportunities.

The Good

The report comes out strongly in favour of Open Access to publicly funded research. Perhaps the core of this is found in the introduction [p5].

The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.

What follows this is a clear listing of other potential returns. On the cost side the report makes clear that in achieving open access through journal it is necessary that the first copy costs of publication be paid in some form and that appropriate mechanisms are in place to make that happen. This focus on Gold OA is a result in large part of the terms of reference for the report that placed retention of peer review at its heart. The other excellent aspect of the report is the detailed cost and economic modelling for multiple scenarios of UK Open Access adoption. These will be a valuable basis for discussion of managing the transition and how cost flows will change.

The bad

The report is maddeningly vague on the potential of repositories to play a major role in the transition to full open access. Throughout there is a focus on hybrid journals, a route which – with a few exceptions – appears to me to have failed to deliver any appreciable gains and simply allowed publishers to charge unjustified fee for very limited services. By comparison the repository offers an existing infrastructure that can deliver at relatively low marginal cost and will enable a dispassionate view of the additional value that publishers add. Because the value of peer review was baked into the report as an assumption this important issue gets lost but as I have noted before if publishers are adding value then repositories should pose no threat to them whatsoever.

The second issue I have with the report is that it fails to address the question of what Open Access is. The report does not seek to define open access. This is a difficult issue and I can appreciate a strict definition may be best avoided but the report does not raise the issues that such a definition would require and in this it misses an opportunity to lay out clearly the discussions required to make decisions on the critical issues of what is functionally required to realise the benefits laid out in the introduction. Thus in the end it is a report on increasing access but with no clear statement of what level of access is desirable or what the end target for this might look like.

This is most serious on the issue of licences for open access content which has been seriously fudged. Four key pieces of text from the report:

“…support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes, and on the ability to use the latest tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content” [recommendations, p7]

“…[in a section on instituional and subject repositories]…But for subscription-based publishers, re-use rights may pose problems. Any requirement for them to use a Creative Commons ‘CC-BY’ licence, for example, would allow users to modify, build upon and distribute the licensed work, for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes, so long as the original authors were credited178. Publishers – and some researchers – are especially concerned about allowing commercial re-use. Medical journal publishers, who derive a considerable part of their revenues from the sale of reprints to pharmaceutical companies, could face significant loss of income. But more generally, commercial re-use would allow third parties to harvest published content from repositories and present them on new platforms that would compete with the original publisher.” [p87]

“…[from the summary on OA journals]…A particular advantage of open access journals is that publishers can afford to be more relaxed about rights of use and re-use.” [p92]

“…[from the summary on repositories]…But publishers have strong concerns about the possibility that funders might introduce further limits on the restrictions on access that they allow in their terms and conditions of grant. They believe that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to six months, especially if it were to be combined with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence that would allow commercial as well as non-commercial re-use, would represent a fundamental threat to the viability of their subscription-based journals.” [p96]

As far as I can tell the comment on page 92 is the only one that even suggests a requirement for CC-BY for open access through journals where the costs are paid. As a critical portion of the whole business model for full OA publishers it worried me that this is given almost a brief throw away line, when it is at the centre of the debate. But more widely a concern over a requirement for liberal licensing in the context of repositories appears to colour the whole discussion of licences in the report. There is, as far as I have been able to tell, no strong statement that where a fee is paid CC-BY should be required – and much that will enable incumbent subscription publishers to continue making claims that they provide “Open Access” under a variety of non-commercial licences satisfying no community definition of either “Open” nor “Open Access”.

But more critically this fudge risks failing to deliver on the minister’s brief, to support innovation and exploitation of UK research. This whole report is embedded in a government innovation strategy that places publicly funded knowledge creation at the heart of an effort to kick start the UK economy. Non-commercial licences can not deliver on this and we should avoid them at all costs. This whole discussion seems to revolve around protecting publishers rights to sell reprints, as though it made sense to legislate to protect candle makers from innovators threatening to put in an electric grid.

Much of this report is positive – and taken in the context of the RCUK draft policy there is a real opportunity to get this right. If we both make a concerted effort to utilise the potential of repositories as a transitional infrastructure, and if we get the licensing right, then the report maps out a credible route with the financial guidelines to make it through a transition. It also sends a strong signal to the White House and the European Commission, both currently considering policy statements on open access, that the UK is ready to move which will strengthen the hands of those arguing for strong policy.

This is a big step – and it heads in the right direction. The devil is in the details of implementation. But then it always is.

More will follow – particularly on the financial modelling – when I have a chance to digest more fully. This is a first pass draft based on a quick skim and I may modify this post if I discover I have made errors in my reading.

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Parsing the Willetts Speech on Access to UK Research Outputs

David Willetts speaking at the Big Society pol...
David Willetts speaking at the Big Society policy launch, Coin St, London. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday David Willetts, the UK Science and Universities Minister gave a speech to the Publishers Association that has got wide coverage. However it is worth pulling apart both the speech and the accompanying opinion piece from the Guardian because there are some interesting elements in there, and also some things have got a little confused.

The first really key point is that there is nothing new here. This is basically a re-announcement of the previous position from the December Innovation Strategy on moving towards a freely accessible literature and a more public announcement of the Gateway to Research project previously mentioned in the RCUK response to the Innovation Statement.

The Gateway to Research project is a joint venture of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills and Research Councils UK to provide a one stop shop for information on UK research funding as well as pointers to outputs. It will essentially draw information directly from sources that already exist (the Research Outputs System and eVal) as well as some new ones with the intention of helping the UK public and enterprise find research and researchers that is of interest to them, and see how they are funded.

The new announcement was that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame will be advising on the GTR portal. This is a good thing and he is well placed to provide both technical and social expertise on the provision of public facing information portals as well as providing a more radical perspective than might come out of BIS itself. While this might in part be cynically viewed as another example of bringing in celebrities to advise on policy this is a celebrity with relevant expertise and real credibility based on making similar systems work.

The rest of the information that we can gather relates to government efforts in moving towards making the UK research literature accessible. Wales also gets a look in here, and will be “advising us on [..] common standards to ensure information is presented in a readily reusable form”. My reading of this is that the Minister understands the importance of interoperability and my hope is that this will mean that government is getting good advice on appropriate licensing approaches to support this.

However, many have read this section of the speech as saying that GTR will act as some form of national repository for research articles. I do not believe this is the intention, and reading between the lines the comment that it will “provide direct links to actual research outputs such as data sets and publications” [my emphasis] is the key. The point of GTR is to make UK research more easily discoverable. Access is a somewhat orthogonal issue. This is better read as an expression of Willetts’ and the wider government’s agenda on transparency of public spending than as a mechanism for providing access.

What else can we tell from the speech? Well the term “open access” is used several times, something that was absent from the innovation statement, but still the emphasis is on achieving “public access” in the near term with “open access” cast as the future goal as I read it. It’s not clear to me whether this is a well informed distinction. There is a somewhat muddled commentary on Green vs Gold OA but not that much more muddled than what often comes from our own community. There are also some clear statements on the challenges for all involved.

As an aside I found it interesting that Willetts gave a parenthetical endorsement of usage metrics for the research literature when speaking of his own experience.

As well as reading some of the articles set by my tutors, I also remember browsing through the pages of the leading journals to see which articles were well-thumbed. It helped me to spot the key ones I ought to be familiar with – a primitive version of crowd-sourcing. The web should make that kind of search behaviour far easier.

This is the most sophisticated appreciation of the potential for the combination of measurement and usage data in discovery that I have seen from any politician. It needs to be set against his endorsement of rather cruder filters earlier in the speech but it nonetheless gives me a sense that there is a level of understanding within government that is greater than we often fear.

Much of the rest of the speech is hedging. Options are discussed but not selected and certainly not promoted. The key message: wait for the Finch Report which will be the major guide for the route the government will take and the mechanisms that will be put in place to support it.

But there are some clearer statements. There is a strong sense that Hargreave’s recommendations on enabling text mining should be implemented. And the logic for this is well laid out. The speech and the policy agenda is embedded in a framework of enabling innovation – making it clear what kinds of evidence and argument we will need to marshal in order to persuade. There is also a strong emphasis on data as well as an appreciation that there is much to do in this space.

But the clearest statement made here is on the end goals. No-one can be left in any doubt of Willetts’ ultimate target. Full access to the outputs of research, ideally at the time of publication, in a way that enables them to be fully exploited, manipulated and modified for any purpose by any party. Indeed the vision is strongly congruent with the Berlin, Bethesda, and Budapest declarations on Open Access. There is still much to be argued about the route and and its length, but in the UK at least, the destination appears to be in little doubt.

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