BOAI: Open Access Movement 10 years After – an interview

Lotta Svantesson September 18th, 2012
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Main recommendations of BOAI according to Alma Swan:

  • First, the policy recommendations, particularly 1.1 and 1.3. These two together exhort institutions and funders to adopt mandatory policies on OA. Note that these recommendations are about ‘green’ OA. I put these first because a coherent policy infrastructure is crucial to progress.
  • Where there is good policy, we see growth of OA. Recommendation 1.6 [“Universities with institutional repositories should require deposit in the repository for all research articles to be considered for promotion, tenure, or other forms of internal assessment and review.”] is an example of good policy, and has been shown to work in practice.
  • Then I’d pick recommendation 2.1, a simple, straightforward, unambiguous recommendation of the use of the CC-BY licence (or an equivalent and, optimally, machine-readable licence). Adoption of this practice will take us where we need to go, which is to turn the scholarly literature into a digital resource for computation.
  • Finally, I think I’d go for recommendation 4.6. This states the need to continue to promote the benefits of OA, clarify the concept, reassure about the costs (properly supported by sensible policy, a move to OA would be cheaper than our current system) and debunk the FUD.

This year [2012] is proving big in terms of OA policy development, and there have been a number of important developments in Europe since you all met in Budapest in February, including the UK Finch Report, the new RCUK OA Policy, plus OA announcements from the European Commission and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Finch/RCUK have proved particularly controversial, and both have been widely criticised by some in the OA movement. These critics argue that policy makers have succumbed to publisher lobbying, and that their approach will likely kill off green OA, and so allow publishers to continue gouging the public purse. As such, they say, both represent a step backwards rather than forwards. Would you agree? What are your views on these developments and their likely implications for the development of OA?….

Read the whole blog post (including email interview)

Important for Europe: Horizon 2020 rules

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