JISC

Along with universities in the UK and a wide range of national organisations, JISC has responded to the RCUK (Research Councils UK) position statement on Access to Research Outputs (full details of the consultation process and the text of the RCUK position statement). JISC's full response is given below:  

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