The more things change: synergy and dissonance in Open Access and Open Education

Significant developments in OA, driven by HEFCE’s “Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework” state that authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be deposited in a repository on acceptance for publication i.e. “green” OA. In many ways the policy is a response to the Finch report and RCUK policy which emphasise “gold” whereby a journal provides immediate OA to articles on the publisher’s website and may levy a fee as an alternative to library subscription.

There is consensus that established models of scholarly communication, especially related to copyright, inhibit scientific progress, and RCUK emphasise that gold OA must be CC-BY. In response, traditional publishers have moved towards a “hybrid” model whereby they facilitate green by permitting “self-archiving” – often subject to embargo – but increasingly promote gold whereby authors pay a fee to publish CC-BY (average fee across the sector ≈ £1800 per article), in stark contrast to the use of open licences in OE more generally and reflecting commercial interests with evidence that publishers benefit in the form of “double dipping”, effectively paid twice for the same content via library subscription and OA fees (Pinfield et al 2014).

To comply with HEFCE, there is considerable activity across the sector to develop robust infrastructure – repositories, CRIS, RIOXX, Jisc’s “Publication Router”, “Open Mirror”, Monitor project and CORE aggregator. Individual HEIs are also iterating to develop infrastructure and appropriate internal policies; at Leeds Beckett, like many Universities, we are looking into the management of APCs to ensure double-dipping does not occur which requires collaboration between library, research office and faculty. In addition, the more specialised requirements of a HEFCE compliant repository means we are reviewing our infrastructure and considering a Jorum “Window” to manage OER rather than the current “blended” repository comprising OA research and OER.

HEFCE policy serves to emphasise OA over OE and there are questions of academic support structure; academic librarians typically specialise in research support or teaching and learning. Increasingly, librarians advocate for OA/OE, particularly using the HEFCE mandate as a tool to encourage OA publishing routes and it was thought OE/OA would solve the problem of the “serial crisis”, this is now not thought to be the case (Harris, 2012).

OA and OE have much to share and remain convergent in many ways. This paper will describe the developing OA landscape and invite participants to explore synergies and dissonance with OE in the contexts of infrastructure, policy and licensing; we will argue that to avoid continued commercial exploitation, the fostering of partnerships across the academy is crucial to mainstreaming Open Education.

Pinfield, S., Salter, J. and Bath, P.A. (2015) The ‘total cost of publication’ in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. (In Press)

Harris, S. (2012) Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries. A report on a roundtable commissioned by SAGE, in association with the British Library