SHERPA-LEAP

Firstly, I’d just like to say that it was a pleasure to get to speak to so many of you at this RSP event. For those of you who were there but to whom I didn’t manage to introduce myself: apologies – I’ll catch up with you soon.

If you were there on Friday, you can stop reading here… for those in the LEAP community who couldn’t make it, I’m posting this summary of who said what. If you would like to read more, the PowerPoint slides of all the presentations are available here.

The title of the event was ‘How mandates work in practice’, and comprised a series of presentations, chiefly from organisations who have mandates in place, mostly research funders although UCL was also represented as an exemplar of an institutional mandate. PEER and the Houghton report formed the topic of two of the presentations.

Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, outlined their policy on OA archiving, reiterated their willingness to meet the costs of OA publication and emphasised that publishers do add value to scholarly communication. He claimed that subscription costs are falling or rising more slowly as a result of ‘author-pays’ OA. While compliance rates are rising, they are still low (33% of eligible papers are on UKPMC). He attributed this to confusing publisher policies and over-complex re-use rights and the fact that it is still incumbent on authors to do the legwork and acknowledged that IR managers, as the first port of call for confused authors, had to deal with a lot of this.

Astrid Wissenburg (of the ESRC but representing RCUK) explained the reasoning behind the funding councils’ support for OA, and emphasised the fact that OA costs were supported under the full economic cost funding regime. She went on to note that although UKRC is to extend its support for OA, including pay-to-publish models, indirect costs are hidden and HEIs will have set up an infrastructure to cover them.

Paul Davey (of UKPMC) gave a demonstration of some of the new services UKPMC is about to introduce. He emphasised that compliance with funder mandates is essentially the funders’ problem. He showed off a grant lookup tool, which links authors to the funding streams for their research publications, and demonstrated new text mining tools, which will link to EBI Citexplore. He emphasised that UKPMC’s end was not to boost public exposure to research, but to create new ways of accessing and exploiting the literature and expanding the world of scholarly communications.

Julia Wallace from the PEER project talked about the rapid growth in IRs and mandates, how publishers are experimenting with new models and the fact there is no agreement on evidence around OA to date, and the resultant confusion and lack of trust between publishers and the academic community. PEER aims to address many of the issues in this area, but the work on embargo management and development of XML metadata outputs from publishers (just for starters!) should be really useful to the IR community.

Charles Oppenheim gave a presentation on the Houghton report, whiich he co-authored. It represents the (current) last word on the costs and benefits of OA and evaluates the economics of traditional subscription and OA models of publishing and of self-archiving. He briefly described the publishing world’s response to the report (in a word: furious) and invited anyone who questioned the figures used in the modelling to put their own numbers in and publish their results.

Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, gave a presentation in which he detailed the historical background in which his thinking on OA had evolved and outlined the evolution of the UCL mandate. He also presented an outline of the structure of the proposed UCL publication management system, and how it aims to capture all the UCL output in order to meet the mandate.

Paul Hubbard from HEFCE gave us the HEFCE view of scholarly communications: It doesn’t matter what research you do, if you don’t share it effectively, you haven’t done much. Scholarly communications matter, because HEFCE wants the UK to have a world class research base, and to get that we need prompt publication. If OA helps, so much the better.

Bill Hubbard from SHERPA gave an overview of the arguments for OA, and explained how OA has actually started to make life more complicated for researchers. In light of this, he suggested that repository managers emphasise the service they can offer to researchers rather than pushing the concept of OA.

Again, the details are on the RSP website, but if you’d like more information, please do let me know.