Open access: With their recent announcement, the largest research funders in the UK, such as the HigherEducation Funding Council for EnglandHEFCE), Wales and Scotland, are adopting a mandatory Open Access policy for all articles funded by the ResearchExcellence Frameworkfrom 2016 onwards.
The Research Excellence Framework is the main national system for evaluating research, which is used by research funders to selectively fund higher education institutions. Whatever the Excellence Framework stipulates, universities are obliged to follow it to the letter. The policy links the deposit of publications in repositories to the Excellence Framework, with the evaluation and funding of higher education institutions, that is, even this simple requirement is expected to change the culture of scientific publications in British universities.
The new criteria apply to all journal and conference proceedings accepted for publication after April 1.They do not apply to monographs or data at this stage. The policy states that manuscripts that have undergone evaluation must be deposited in an institutional or thematic repository at the same time as their acceptance for publication. Metadata describing the publication, such as title, author, etc., must be immediately searchable by anyone through common search engines. If a time embargo has been imposed by the publisher, manuscripts must be available to anyone, including for download, as soon as it expires.
The new Excellence Framework also states that every university applying for funding must demonstrate how it supports open access. The policy was adopted after an extensive stakeholder consultation, which received 460 responses.
Alma Swan, director of SPARC, argues that the importance of the newly adopted policy lies on the one hand in recognizing the importance and supporting repositories in the practical and low-cost implementation of open access and in the fact that it integrates open access into the publication workflow, requiring authors to deposit their publication in a repository while they are still actively in the publication process.
More information:
https://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2014/news86805.html
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/01/hefce-open-access-ref-gamechanger/
