Report: “Putting Down Roots: Securing the Future of Open Access Policies”

This study, commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, explores the relationship between open-access policies and services. Drawing on a consultation with funders, institutions and service providers across the ve Knowledge Exchange countries and beyond, it identies the key services needed to successfully implement open-access policies, and suggests priorities for action in support of an open scholarly infrastructure.

From the Introduction:

The movement to improve access to research publications began in the 1990s, when access to the World Wide Web became widely available and online publishing became increasingly common. Since then, a wide range of non-commercial services has been developed, largely by the scholarly community, to support stakeholders in the process of OA publishing. More recently, major research funders and higher education institutions (HEIs) have developed and implemented policies to promote, or mandate, open access to academic research. As the complexity of complying with such policies became increasingly clear, so the reliance on existing support services has grown. Yet the initial development of these services often happened organically, prior to the widespread adoption of OA policies, and the relationship between OA policies and services remains poorly understood.

The need to develop a sustainable infrastructure to support OA is increasingly recognised across the scholarly communications landscape leading Bilder, Lin and Neylon to propose a set of “Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures”

in early 2015. Knowledge Exchange (KE), a co-operative effort that supports the use and development of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) infrastructure for higher education and research in five European countries, has previously commissioned two studies looking at the financial sustainability of OA services.

Building on these studies, this report for KE looks at the extent to which OA policies depend on the growing number of non-commercial OA services, and whether this presents risks for the implementation of OA policies – and indeed the OA movement as a whole.