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The new RCUK draft Open Access mandate

Research Councils UK (RCUK) – a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access mandate, for all research which they help fund.

The new proposed policies include (quoting from the draft):

  • Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.
  • Research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils should ideally be made Open Access on publication, and must be made Open Access after no longer than the Research Councils’maximum acceptable embargo period. [6 months for all except AHRC & ESRC for which 12 months is the maximum delay permitted].
  • researchers are strongly encouraged to publish their work in compliance with the policy as soon as possible. [added emphasis, mine]

As a researcher funded by BBSRC myself – I’m thrilled to read this document.

It shows a clear understanding of the issues, including explicit statements on the need of different types of access – both manual AND automated:

The existing policy will be clarified by specifically stating that Open Access includes unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools. Also, that it allows unrestricted re-use of content with proper attribution – as defined by the Creative Commons CC-BY licence

 

But as a strong supporter of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science, and Science Code Manifesto, I’m a little disappointed that the policy improvements with respect to data and code access are comparatively minor. Such underlying research materials need only be ‘accessible’ with few further stipulations as to how. AFAIK this allows researchers to make their data available via pigeon-transport (only) on Betamax tapes, 10 years after the data was generated *if there is no ‘best practice’ standard in one’s field.

The BBSRC’s data sharing policy for example seems to favour cost-effectiveness over transparency: “It should also be cost effective and the data shared should be of the highest quality.” and maddeningly seems to give researchers ownership over data, even though the data was obtained using BBSRC-funding: “Ownership of the data generated from the research that BBSRC funds resides with the investigators and their institutions.” This seems rather devoid of logic to me – if taxpayers paid for this data to be created, surely they should have some ownership of it? Finally ”Where best practice does not exist, release of data within three years of its generation is suggested.” 3 years huh? And that’s only a suggestion! Does anyone actually check that data is made available after those 3 years? I suspect not.

Admittedly, it would be hard to create a good one-size fits all policy, and policing it would cost more money, but I do feel that data & code sharing policies could be tightened-up in places, to enable more frictionless sharing, re-using and building-on previous research outputs.

So all in all this is a great step in the right direction towards Open Scholarship, particularly for BBB-compliant Open Access.

Related reactions and comments which are highly worth reading include posts by Casey Bergman, Peter Suber, and Richard Van Noorden.

Creative Commons Licence This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, so feel free to redistribute, remix and re-use! All that I ask for is attribution :)


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