---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:13:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Subbiah Arunachalam <subbiah_a@yahoo.com> From Richard Poynder,s Open and Shut blog Wednesday, July 18, 2012 The Finch Report and its implications for the developing world There are two routes to�Open Access. With�gold OA, publishers cease to�charge readers�to access scholarly journals (in the form of subscriptions), but instead charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (by means of an article-processing charge, or�APC). This allows publishers to make research papers freely available on the Internet. With�green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but then self-archive their papers in their�institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. In this way, researchers can make their papers freely available themselves. Over the years there has been much debate as to which is the better method for achieving OA, but no consensus has ever been reached. In the past month, however, a number of developments have served to focus minds on the respective merits of green and gold as never before. It began with the publication on 18th June of the�Finch Report. Chaired by�Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was formed last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science�David Willetts, and asked to consider how access to research could be expanded. Clear policy direction After giving the matter due consideration, the Finch Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in open access or hybrid�journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially where the research has been publicly funded. In other words, Finch recommended that gold OA should be viewed as the norm for publishing research papers. By contrast, Finch recommended that the institutional repository (i.e. green OA) should be relegated to the role of bit player, merely providing access to research data and to grey literature and assisting in digital preservation. Where self-archiving does take place, Finch suggested, it would be unreasonable to allow papers to be deposited before an embargo period of at least 12 months had passed (except where publishers do not offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold). The Finch report ignited a firestorm of protest, not least because it estimated that its recommendations would cost the UK research community an additional 50-60 million UK Pounds a year. Since it was clear that there would be no additional funding from the UK government, this meant that universities would have to find the additional money from existing budgets. University College London (UCL) Vice-Provost (Research) David Price concluded, "The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense. Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?" Serving to spur on the complaints, a few weeks later a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) concluded that green OA offered a much more cost-effective route. Specifically, OAIG said, where a unilateral move to gold OA in the UK would cost large research intensive institutions about £1.7 million a year, a unilateral move to green OA would cost only around £100,000 a year. In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that when on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy, it reinstated green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisted on no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers), apparently ignoring many of the Finch recommendations. RCUK's new policy, we should note, was published just hours before David Willetts announced that he was accepting all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals. The very next day (yesterday) the EC issued a Communication on providing better access to scientific information in which it proposed an OA policy that mimics the RCUK policy. No easy task Where this leaves the Finch recommendations remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that adopting a national OA policy in a research environment that is truly global is no easy task - particularly where gold OA is viewed as the main vehicle for achieving OA. For read the complete blog post including EPTs formal response to the Finch report, which was signed by EPT chairman Professor Derek Law, you may visit: http://poynder.blogspot.in/2012/07/the-finch-report-and-its-implications.htm...