This will be overseen by the Open Access Team in UCL Library Services.
All enquiries about Open Access and the Fund should be directed to open-access-funding@ucl.ac.uk.

Professor Jones’ main concerns are:
1. Finch’s lack of awareness of the role of learned societies in society where sales of publications are used to cross -subsidise early career researchers in the social sciences and humanities. The models advocated for gold open access will not be financially viable and so damage future research in these areas;

2. The science bias of the proposals which does not acknowledge the different nature of humanities research which has a long shelf life , is not usually time dependent , is monograph and edited collection based and does not generally attract research grants;

3. Unless the whole international community is involved this will not work and that the idea that subscription costs will be reduced by the publishers as a result of the shift to APRs is unlikely;

4. Finch has said that this system will only work with increased funding and the funding offered thus far is insufficient, highly targeted and will put a strain on institutions already paying high subscription charges and now APR fees as well; and

5. No attention is given to the financial support for those areas without research or university funding such as early career researchers, retired, independent or overseas researchers.

He is grateful for the suggestion of an extension to the green open access route where lengthier embargoes would allow a longer payback time and urges all interested parties to join in the debate.

He writes of the ongoing debate for scientists who want to support open access but feel they must use high impact subscription journals thus preventing the popularisation of their subject area and, more importantly, access to this knowledge by scientists from developing countries.

He then summarises the open access initiatives to date highlighting the boycott by more than 11000 scientists of Elsevier, the rise of PloS and PNAS as publishers of open access journals, the initiatives by the Wellcome Trust and the altruism of the Winston Hide of the Harvard School of Public Health who resigned as associate editor of Genomics saying that he “can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research”.

This was after widespread misunderstanding of its position on gold (paid for) open access versus green (self archived work). Russell group universities have expressed grave doubts about the cost of using gold only on research budgets so this is a timely intervention.

The paper that takes the accolade for this milestone achievement is authored by Professor Richard Blundell (UCL), Professor Thomas MaCurdy (Stanford) and Professor Costas Meghir (UCL):

Blundell, R. and MaCurdy, T. and Meghir, C. (2007) Labor supply models: unobserved heterogeneity, nonparticipation and dynamics. In: Heckman, J. and Leamer, E., (eds.) Handbook of Econometrics: Volume 6A. (pp. 4667-4771). Elsevier: Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Over the past decade, the Initiative has worked to make academic research, much of which is publicly funded, freely and publicly available. In the detailed statement outlining their goals and recommendations for the next ten tears, the BOAI ambition is to see OA becoming ‘the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every (research) field and country’.

The four recommendations include:

Open Access policies in every higher education institution assuring all future scholarly articles (peer-reviewed versions) and future theses and dissertations are deposited in the institution’s designated repository (UCL’s Publication Policy is available online);

Moving away from journal impact factors using article-level metrics (ALMs) instead. (Examples of ALMs and how they are used can be seen on PLoS website);

Using the Creative Commons CC-BY (or an equivalent) license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work; and,

Repositories and publishers making both download, usage, and citation data available to their authors, and to the tools computing alternative impact metrics (UCL Discovery downloads are available.

The recommendations are also available in French, German, Italian, Polish , Portuguese, Russian and Spanish .

Judith Burns, BBC News Education reporter, quoted John O’Leary from the Times Good University Guide as saying ‘UCL in particular had done a lot better than in previous years in terms of the number of times its research had been cited in academic journals’.

Although no direct link has been made to UCL’s commitment to Open Access, the download figures for UCL’s Open Access repository, UCL Discovery, continue to show a growing interest in UCL research made freely available. For example, the total downloads in August 2011 came to approximately 3,000, but for August 2012 the figure had risen to 7,000 downloads per month. Comparing annual total downloads show the true extent of the increase:

2008: 188,751
2009: 305,462
2010: 531,905
2011: 584,965

Although there is an ongoing debate on whether or not it can be proved conclusively that Open Access increases citation counts, studies continue to support the link. In a paper presented at the 2011 iConference by Lifang Xu, Jinhong Liu, and Qing Fang of the Wuhan University, Xu et al reported that Open Access articles have, on average, citation rates 138.87% higher than articles not made available on Open Access. They suggested further research is needed to look at any variation in benefits resulting from journal impact factors and research disciplines.

One of the examples he draws on is his attempts to access a paper about a successful palliative care programme in Kerala. The programme exists mainly on donations of less than 70 pence a time yet the paper about the programme costs nearly $50 to access without a subscription.

In his summary Dr Smith states “None of the people who wrote the articles I’ve been accessing were paid for writing them. They are supported by public money, and publishers are making money by restricting access to their work. I argued to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission that far from adding value to the publishing process publishers are subtracting value. I stand by that, and I’m angry.”