{"id":23,"date":"2014-05-12T15:50:44","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T14:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/?p=23"},"modified":"2014-09-03T18:31:18","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T17:31:18","slug":"open-access-news-march-april-2014-hefce-oa-policy-and-wellcome-apc-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/2014\/05\/12\/open-access-news-march-april-2014-hefce-oa-policy-and-wellcome-apc-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Access News, March-April 2014: HEFCE OA policy and Wellcome APC data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the College’s\u00a0Open Access Publishing group<\/a>\u00a0I put together a semi-regular digest of news and recent developments around to Open Access and related topics. As this might be of interest to others too, we have decided to make this available via the blog too.\u00a0For more information on OA, take a look at the\u00a0Open Access website of the College Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n

General News<\/h3>\n

HEFCE<\/b>\u00a0have released their\u00a0Open Access policy<\/a>. We will discuss this in more detail later, but this policy is likely to be a game changer as far as Open Access in the UK is concerned.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Research Information Network<\/b>\u00a0have released a report on\u00a0Monitoring Progress in the Transition to Open Access<\/a>, including proposals for a framework of indicators to monitor progress towards open access. Jisc have, informally, confirmed that their OA Monitor project is likely to address at least part of this if institutions find this useful.<\/p>\n

From April 2014 onwards,\u00a0the National Institute for Health Research<\/b>\u00a0will expect peer-reviewed articles to\u00a0be made available as Gold OA<\/a>, expecting full compliance within four years.<\/p>\n

Wellcome and NIH<\/b>\u00a0are\u00a0withholding grant payments<\/a>\u00a0when OA obligations are not met (Imperial scholars have not been affected by this).<\/p>\n

The\u00a0University of Konstanz<\/b>\u00a0has broken off license negotiations with Elsevier<\/a>\u00a0and will no longer subscribe to any Elsevier content. \u201cThe publisher\u2019s prices are too high, said university Rector Ulrich R\u00fcdiger in a statement, and the institution \u2018will no longer keep up with this aggressive pricing policy and will not support such an approach.\u2019 [\u2026] Adding to tensions, the university hinted, was a feeling that academia is essentially paying twice for its own work. \u2018Universities are in a way forced to purchase a good back in the form of expensive subscription fees \u2013 a good which is actually produced by their own scientists,\u2019 said Petra H\u00e4tscher, a university administrator, in a statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association<\/b>\u00a0has suspended Springer\u2019s membership<\/a>\u00a0because of systematic problems with the editorial process at Springer revealed by the so-called \u201cOpen Access sting<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Jisc, RLUK, RCUK, Wellcome Trust and others\u00a0published a report<\/a>\u00a0that examines the potential risks associated with the\u00a0APC open access market<\/b>\u00a0(APC = Article Processing Charge for OA articles). The economic analyses undertaken provided a strong indication that the full open access journal market is functioning well in creating pressure for journals to moderate the price of APCs. On the other hand, the\u00a0current hybrid market was found to be extremely dysfunctional<\/b>, with significantly higher charges and low levels of uptake. Indeed, the average APC in a hybrid journal was found to be almost twice that for a born-digital full open access journal ($2,727 compared to $1,418). The authors suggest different approaches, including only paying APCs to hybrid journals that offer reductions for subscriptions payments or setting caps to APCs in relation to the quality and range of services offered by the journal.<\/p>\n

Wellcome Trust releases data on Article Processing Charges for Open Access<\/h3>\n

The\u00a0Wellcome Trust released the full data on the APC spend 2012-13<\/b><\/a>. A community effort led to that data being cleaned up (Google doc spreadsheet<\/a>) and analysed within a few days. The analysis revealed that the average APC paid by Wellcome is \u00a31,820.<\/p>\n

In her analysis,\u00a0Michelle Brook<\/a>\u00a0from the Open Knowledge Foundation highlighted that most of the money goes to hybrid journals<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

In Oct 2012 \u2013 Sept 2013, academics spent \u00a33.88 million to publish articles in journals with immediate online access \u2013 of which \u00a33.17 million (82 % of costs, 74 % of papers) was paying for publications that Universities would then be charged again for. For perspective, this is a figure slightly larger than the Wellcome Trust paid in 2012\/2013 on their Society & Ethics portfolio. Only \u00a30.70 million of the charity\u2019s \u00a33.88m didn\u2019t have any form of double charging (ie, was published in a \u201cPure Open Access\u201d journal) \u2013 with this total being dominated by articles published in PLOS and BioMed Central journals (68 % of total \u2018pure\u2019 hybrid journal costs, 80 % of paper total).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ernesto Priego<\/a>\u00a0is concerned that high APC may effectively just shift\u00a0the serials crisis from the library to the research budget<\/b>\u00a0and that arts and humanities researchers in particular might be priced out of publishing. He has created a visualisation of the lowest and highest APCs charged by 11 publishers (image licensed CC BY SA 3.0):<\/p>\n

\"Lowest<\/a><\/p>\n

Analysis of the Wellcome data has also identified issues with the licensing information<\/b>\u00a0on publishers\u2019 websites:<\/p>\n