Jisc Response to RCUK Position Statement on Access to Research Outputs

Jisc response to RCUK position statement on
access to research outputs

1. The Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc)  welcomes the
Research Councils UK (RCUK) position statement on
Access to Research Outputs. The Jisc has a remit to ensure joined-up
thinking across the boundaries of research, learning and teaching, and the
administration functions within institutions to avoid multiple solutions
being adopted. 

2. The RCUK position statement complements existing and future Jisc
programmes to improve access to resources, to support research and learning
and teaching. Repositories are being adopted by higher education
institutions to store learning and teaching and administrative data in
addition to journals and other research resources. Subject-based
communities are also adopting repositories to store and make accessible
research resources. 

3. The Jisc supports the sector in providing infrastructure services
and in some cases national repositories and data stores where community
content can be stored, shared and used. Jisc also funds significant
development work to explore some of the technical and organisational issues
that surround the provision of content of all types.  

4. The Jisc has a responsibility to provide solutions that help UK
research communities to keep their activities world class through the
innovative use of ICT.  Open access research repositories can support
research access, impact and management. The evidence is that open access
research repositories are being developed in a substantial proportion of
OECD countries .  The RCUK position statement will help to ensure that
the UK maintains its position at the forefront of international
research. 

5. The Jisc supports initiatives to enhance access to the products of
publicly-funded UK research and is spending over £10 million per annum on
digital repositories from 2006. Access to research outputs will be improved
as a result of the statement by the RCUK on open access but Jisc’s
supporting initiatives will be at risk if the statement is weakened. 
Jisc therefore welcomes the proposal for mandatory deposit of journal
articles by authors into a repository. In particular, the Jisc notes that:

• The current system of journal publication has significant shortcomings,
  and there is robust evidence that it negatively affects the
  effectiveness, efficiency and impact of UK research (see 
  Scientific Publications: Free for all? Tenth Report of the House
  of Commons Science and Technology Committee).
• There is no substantive evidence that a mandatory requirement on
  researchers to deposit a copy of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript
  into an open access repository will impact negatively on journal
  publishers’ business – indeed, such evidence as exists (such as that
  relating to the long-established e-print archive ‘arXiv’) suggests the opposite (see Swan, A. and Brown, S (2005) 
  Open access self-archiving: an author study). 
  Furthermore, the evidence shows that the mandatory requirement is an
  essential component of an effective position on open access.
• Research has begun to identify viable business models consistent with
  open access that can be adopted by learned societies. Jisc recently
  funded a study
  to explore how learned society publishers can consider making a
  transition to a sustainable open access business model, and what the
  funding sources and requirements would be in order to do so.

6. The Jisc is investing heavily in an infrastructure to enable
innovative research to take place, including interoperable repositories,
preservation best practice and user-oriented services, and open access
remains an important cornerstone of this infrastructure. The Jisc looks
forward to continuing to collaborate against a common agenda and work with
RCUK to improve access to publicly-funded research.

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Jisc Chairman

August 2005