Abstract
In the UK in June 2012, the Finch Group published its report “Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications.” The Finch Group, with representatives from scholarly publishing and UK academia, agreed that the broad open access is the way of the future and that the preferred path is gold open access. On 16 July 2012, the Research Councils UK unveiled its new open access policy informed by the work of the Finch Group. The policy mandates that research outputs must be published in journals that are compliant with Research Council policy on open access and must use the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY), when an Article Processing Charge (APC) is levied. The Research Council also announced it would provide block grants to eligible UK Higher Education Institutions, support payment of the APCs associated with pay-to-publish.
This paper outlines what this means for the UK library consortium in supporting it members in terms of containing ongoing cost of gold open access while maintaining journal subscriptions and in the practical issues of implementing the Research Councils policy.
The British National Approach to Scholarly Communication
In the UK in June 2012, the Finch Group published its report “Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications.” The Finch Group, with representatives from scholarly publishing and UK academia, agreed that the broad open access is the way of the future and that the preferred path is gold open access. On 16 July 2012, the Research Councils UK unveiled its new open access policy informed by the work of the Finch Group. The policy mandates that research outputs must be published in journals that are compliant with Research Council policy on open access and must use the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY), when an Article Processing Charge (APC) is levied. The Research Council also announced it would provide block grants to eligible UK Higher Education Institutions, support payment of the APCs associated with pay-to-publish.
This paper outlines what this means for the UK library consortium in supporting it members in terms of containing ongoing cost of gold open access while maintaining journal subscriptions and in the practical issues of implementing the Research Councils policy.