What's changed? The key driver has been the publication of the Finch report last year, which advocated a clear move towards gold open access. Following the government's positive reaction to Finch, the UK's major funders of academic research – the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust – are tightening up their open access policies.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) policies are changing from a mandate that the research funded by them be published as either green or gold open access and that permitted grant applicants include article processing charge (APC) costs in their bid. The new policy clearly supports gold over green open access (while still accepting green open access in some circumstances). They are also moving to a system of block payments to higher education institutions to support gold open access, including payment of APCs. As a result, universities will have to set up institutional funds to manage and report on this money. From 1 April 2013, any researcher publishing a paper from a grant funded by a research council or the Wellcome Trust will have to comply with the policy.

"There are no options; this is a requirement," warns Neil Jacobs, Jisc programme director, digital infrastructure. "However, the Research Councils see this very much as a journey rather than a one-off switch and are looking at a five year transition and will actively monitor and review progress. Even after that time, they acknowledge that it won't be 100% open access" he concedes.

While the long-term effects of opening up taxpayer-funded research will be positive, initially the changes are likely to be disruptive for many. However, there's advice and support available for everyone affected. For researchers, concerned about where they may now publish their work, there is the Jisc-funded Sherpa-RoMEO site. It will carry support pages to tell authors what they should do, depending on who they are funded by and where they wish to publish. This information will come from an analysis of the extent to which journals have routes (green or gold) that comply with RCUK and Wellcome's policies. It will be available via a user interface and an application programming interface (API), so that it can be embedded into university web pages where it can be supplemented with institution-specific information (for example, how to access money for APCs from the institutional open access fund).

Universities face different challenges. They will now have to manage publication payments to publishers – and for a large, research-intensive university this could mean 10,000 or more individual article payments a year. We have been working with the Open Access Implementation Group to look into the role of intermediaries between publishers and universities. It's a role that, in the subscriptions world, Jisc Collections (among other commercial agents) has always fulfilled to gain efficiencies for both sides. It is now applying the same principle to the new gold open access world of APCs. It has partnered with Open Access Key (OAK), the established open access online payment platform, to ease the passage of APCs from universities to publishers.

"The UK produces around 120,000 research papers a year – this is a huge number of articles moving between authors and publishers. We're bringing efficiencies to the party by creating a platform that both publishers and universities can use," says Paul Harwood, Jisc Collections deputy CEO. "For publishers, we want to ensure that the cost of dealing with universities is kept to a minimum by consolidating payments. For universities, we're trying to provide an effective gateway to manage a new development as efficiently as possible."

This work is a one year pilot project because, Paul says: “this is a rapidly changing environment”. Beginning on 1 April – although universities can still join after that time – it will be evaluated after twelve months and then, if appropriate, become a fully fledged service. All types of universities are being welcomed into the study, from the research-intensive to others whose research output may be much smaller but who would still find it helpful to have a tool to manage it. There is a genuine mixture taking part so far and those universities involved will have OAK's fee waived or picked up by Jisc Collections for the duration of the pilot.

"We're hoping to benefit from the established infrastructure of OAK and the reputation of Jisc Collections – we're a tried and tested service, administrative and financial intermediary between universities and publishers – hopefully giving universities the best of both worlds and delivered in time for the start of the new arrangements in April," explains Paul.

Gold open access does not preclude the green route and Jisc is producing metadata guidance and software, through the RIOXX project, to enable repositories to report on research outputs to the Research Councils. It is also developing RepositoryNet+ to make repositories more efficient and effective. “Many higher education providers will want copies of their papers in their local repositories for various reasons, even if they are also gold open access on publisher sites. The CC-BY licence makes this possible,” says Jisc's Neil Jacobs.

However, all the changes call for a more considered, coherent and collective approach to open access from all parties.
"Our traditional point of contact with universities is the library but what changes in a gold open access environment is that, while the library is very likely to still be involved, universities are looking much more widely at how they manage gold scholarly publishing. Maybe the research office will take a greater role or procurement teams may get involved as a step change in ways of working," says Paul.

Neil agrees: "A key message for universities is that they will have to work across the research office, library, finance office and IT services to make this work," he concludes.