2.3 Funder mandates/policies for green and gold

Since the publication of the Finch Report in the UK, funder mandates from Research Councils UK (RCUK) were altered in accordance.

greengold

Previously, all 7 funders had adopted a green open access mandate since 2005, in 2013, after a number of revisions; RCUK published a new mandate, which aimed to achieve the “immediate, unrestricted, online access to peer reviewed and published research papers, free of any access charge”. The mandate described the route to open access via compliant journals as:

The journal provides, via its own website, immediate and unrestricted access to the final published version of the paper, which should be made available using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher.

                Or,

The journal consents to deposit of the Accepted Manuscript in any repository, without restriction on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. No APC will be payable to the publisher.

This has had large scale ramifications for repository managers/journals teams in the UK. Firstly there have been a number of assumptions and common questions to deal with, however, many of these questions have been less about gold open access, and more about lack of guidance and general misunderstandings about open access, for example:

  • I can’t publish where I want to: There is no restriction on where to publish, most journal offer green or gold OA
  • I can’t afford to publish: many universities offer OA funds, in addition there is the RCUK block grant (see below), green OA is free
  • OA isn’t peer reviewed:- OA does not mean no peer review, most OA journals are peer reviewed
  • What if it is a book, music score, art work?  So far, funders only include journals and conference papers, although Wellcome Tust has now mandated open access monographs, albeit with a different CC licence.

This is largely an issue for advocacy. In addition, Sherpa FACT assists researchers on checking journals for compliance with funder requirements.

In addition the ‘block grant’ provided by RCUK and/or University OA funds, which have been released in order to pay for gold open access APCs have created an additional burden on library staffing.

2.1    The ‘traditional’ green model

2.2    Gold Open Access

2.3    Funder mandates/policies for green and gold

2.4    The effect of gold on workflows and staffing

2.5    Pure gold vs. hybrid journals

2.6    APC processing services

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