1. Unearthing Gold: Hard Labour
for Publishers and Institutions?
Paul Harwood, UKSG Briefing Session, April 2014

2. Context:
The Finch Report: ‘Expanding Access to Published Research
Findings’
The introduction of the RCUK Policy in the UK in April 2013
Activity:
Survey of RLUK
members in
January 2014
Face-to-face
Interviews with
7 publishers in
March 2014
Telephone
interviews with
representatives
from 4 European
countries
Output:
A ‘quick and dirty’ insight into what has been
happening since last April and how it is being
perceived

3. “This is a journey not an event..............”
(Various RCUK representatives, January-April 2013)

5. Research Councils UK

8. The Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of
Aberdeen
University of Birmingham Library Services
University of Bristol Library
British Library
Cambridge University Library
Cardiff University Information Services
Durham University Library
The University of Edinburgh Information
Services
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow Library
Imperial College London Library
King’s College London Library Services
University of Leeds Library
University of Liverpool Library
University of London Senate House Libraries
LSE Library
University of Manchester Library
National Library of Scotland
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National
Library of Wales
Newcastle University Library
The University of Nottingham Information
Services
University of Oxford Libraries
Queen Mary, University of London
Queen’s University Belfast Information
Services
SOAS, University of London
The University of Sheffield Library
University of Southampton Library
University of St Andrews Library
Trinity College Library Dublin
University College London Library Services
Victoria and Albert Museum National Art
Library
University of Warwick Library
Wellcome Library
The University of York Library & Archives
34
members
(and
growing)

9. The Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen
University of Birmingham Library Services
University of Bristol Library
Cambridge University Library
Cardiff University Information Services
Durham University Library
The University of Edinburgh Information Services
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow Library
Imperial College London Library
King’s College London Library Services
University of Leeds Library
University of Liverpool Library
University of London Senate House Libraries
LSE Library
University of Manchester Library
Newcastle University Library
The University of Nottingham Information Services
University of Oxford Libraries
Queen Mary, University of London
Queen’s University Belfast Information Services
SOAS, University of London
The University of Sheffield Library
University of Southampton Library
University of St Andrews Library
University College London Library Services
University of Warwick Library
The University of York Library & Archives
28 members
are in receipt
of RCUK
funding

10. University of Birmingham Library Services
University of Bristol Library
Cardiff University Information Services
The University of Edinburgh Information Services
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow Library
Imperial College London Library
King’s College London Library Services
University of Leeds Library
University of Liverpool Library
LSE Library
University of Manchester Library
The University of Nottingham Information Services
University of Oxford Libraries
Queen’s University Belfast Information Services
The University of Sheffield Library
University of Southampton Library
University College London Library Services
University of Warwick Library
The University of York Library & Archives
20 responses
(71% of
eligible
institutions)

11. 6
12
1. Does your institution have a mandate for author’s
depositing their research outputs in the institutional
repository?
Yes
No

12. “No, but there is a proposed policy which we hope to introduce soon”
“Not a mandate but “Recommended” and “Encouraged” from 2006”
“Yes, 2012”
“2006, revised in 2008”
“2013”
“2009”
“2013”
“We have a policy and there is debate across the sector
to whether things are mandates if they are policies.
We say it is a policy and not strictly a mandate”.
“We have an Open Access policy, but it is not strictly a mandate”.

14. 4
16
2. Did your institution have an institutional fund for
paying Gold OA APC’s prior to the new RCUK regime
in April 2013?
Yes
No

15. 14
6
3. Does your institution have an institutional fund for
paying Gold OA APC’s now?
Yes
No

16. 19
1
4. Was your institution in receipt of funding from BIS
to help manage the transition to Gold OA under the
new RCUK regime?
Yes
No

17. 9
5
1
5. If yes, please indicate how it was used
Prepayments to
publishers
Staff resource
Infrastructure

18. Prepayments to publishers, some retrospective articles made
Gold, some staff resources for awareness raising
Prepayments and staff resource
Prepayments, APCs, staff resource, awareness raising events and advocacy
Staff, infrastructure, APC costs
Prepayments, APCs
Some retrospective APCs to pilot workflows
Mostly on prepayments with a small amount on staff
Covered payment of APCs, staff resources and infrastructure
Pre-payments to publishers
Infrastructure
Staff resource
Staff resource
Prepayments to publishers and Retrospective „golding‟ of REF papers
The majority on individual APC's, some prepayments, small increase in some staff
hours see http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/86332/
Staff resource and APCs
Prepayments to publishers
Prepayments/Gold APC payments

19. Library Services
Research and Graduate Services
Research Office and the Library
Library Services
Library
Library and Research and Innovation Office
jointly
Research Services
Library Services (new Open Access funding
team)
Library
Scholarly Communications Team,
Library & University Collections.
Library but shared with others
Library
Library/Research Mgt
Library/Research Policy Division
Library
Library services

20. Can you confirm how many APC’s have been published under
the RCUK mandate YTD?
6; 19, 23; 44; 70;
73; 74; 75; 76; 89;
97; 100; 110; 143;
167;260; 566
An average of 117............
17 responses saying:

21. Based on the above, how many do you anticipate will be
published in the first year of operation?
Based on the above, how many do you anticipate will
be published in the first year of operation?
30; 30; 31; 70; 90; 90; 100; 100; 100; 100; 130; 130-150; 150; 166;
167; 170; 200; 400; 590
with an average of 150
19 responses saying:

22. 2,216 articles
£3.9m spent on APCs (incl VAT)
Ave APC price: £1,800

23. 15 institutions responded offering
either a % amount or an actual
figure:
Approximately how much of your allocated funding for
expenditure on APCs has the institution spent on Gold
APCs (YTD)?
10%
25%
30%
33%
33%
50%
50%
53%
70%
90%
£30k; £86k; £213k; £220k; £456k

24. Can you state which is the most expensive and cheapest APC
you have paid under the RCUK regime YTD?
£3,120; £3,800; £2067; £3,950; £3,780; £3,780; $4,000; £3,780; £3947
including VAT, plus £1028 for page charges £5942; $5,000; £3,287;
$6,000; £3,200; £3,780; £2557; £3750; £3,000; £4,400; £2,145
Euro 840, £660, £845, £200; £405; £324; £99; £788; £240; £248; £200;
£97.64; £300; £900; £550; €384; £780
19 responses saying:
17 responses saying:

28. 131
6
9. How is your Institution managing APC
transactions?
Own
system
OAK
Jisc APC

29. 16
3
11. Is your institution monitoring whether or not
articles funded have indeed been made available as
Open Access articles?
Yes
No

30. How are you doing this?
“At a point after we have paid for publication
(usually about 2 weeks) we manually check
the article availability and
Licensing”
“Not centrally but we would expect
authors to do this”.
“When reconciling accounts, a member
of the repository team checks the status
and licence”
“Post-publication checking, linked with
depositing published PDFs in our
institutional repository”.
“The only certain way is manually for now”

31. How are you doing this?
.
“By checking publisher web sites, this has been a big problem - publishers failing to
make papers open access, then making them open access and trying to charge us
again...”
“Our repository staff look for the gold articles to add to our repository. There may
be a lag so we do have to chase up some publishers. We'd like to be more proactive
at this or be more confident that publishers would actually make articles OA as
sometimes we need to chase up publishers.”
“This is the most difficult aspect of supporting RCUK the policy. We have
contacted all authors in receipt of RCUK funding to inform them about Library
support for complying, the existence of the institutional publication fund. We have
also run various database searches to identify RCUK funded papers. Without a
central CRIS system, however, it is difficult to identify all RCUK funded papers
without the author informing us directly.”
“We are now beginning to check all journal articles for funder acknowledgements
added to our institutional repository but this is a time-consuming process”.

32. 11
7
14. Are you maintaining a record of which licence
published articles are available under?
Yes
No

33. Can you provide a breakdown?
“No, but we check for CC-BY availability before paying the APC”
“All CC-BY, we don't accept any others as these are noncompliant”
“18 = CC-BY; 1 = CC-BY-NC-ND”
“CC-BY = 84 CC-BY-NC = 5 CC-BY-NC-ND =6 CC-BY-NC-SA = 3 Not CC = 10 Not yet
published = 35”
“Only in the sense that we request a copy of the CC BY licence to be sent to us when
applying for RCUK funds - I don't currently have figures.”
“We are checking this - they should all be CC-BY but there is lack of clarity about
several and we query these with publishers”
“We plan to do this retrospectively”
“We are only allowing CCBY licences as per the RCUK guidelines.”
“We try to include this information in the metadata of articles in our repository, it's
not always easy to track down”
“To a certain extent yes. We are currently working on the report and I was quite
surprised that most of the RCUK articles I extracted did actually have a licence type on
our system”
“Of those that are now published OA, I know around 80-85% have the CC-BY licence,
and the others I am currently chasing and have been for some time with the
publishers”
“We have assumed that to use RCUK money they must have a CC-BY licence. If don't
offer this, don't pay the APC charge”

34. 17
3
17. Have you made pre-payments to publishers in
respect of APC’s funded under the RCUK regime?
Yes
No
How many publishers? An average of 5, with a highest of 16

35. 0
2
17
18. How well do you think publishers have communicated
with your authors regarding the new RCUK regime?
Very well
Quite well
Not very
well

36. 0
4
15
19. How well do you think RCUK has communicated
with your authors regarding their new regime?
Very well
Quite well
Not very
well

37. 1
11
7
7. How would you characterise your Institution’s
response to the Finch Report and the subsequent RCUK
funding regime?
Wholly supportive
Supportive but with
reservations about the
costs
Supportive but with
reservations about the
strategic direction

38. 4
13
8. How would you characterise your Institution’s
direction to its authors in terms of following RCUK
policy?
Along the lines of the
RCUK policy (with a
preference for Gold OA)
Expressing institutional
preference for achieving
RCUK objectives via the
Green route

39. Publishers: How has it been
for you?..........
A journey or an event?
Some emerging themes from Face-to-
face interviews with 7 publishers in
February and March 2014

40. For one, the RCUK policy represented
“a seismic shift” in their thinking and
approach to OA.
For others, it had “a big impact” and
saw OA become “mainstream”
For one, it led to “an acceleration of
activity rather than a sea change”
For another, it instigated their
institutional membership programme
“ A game
changer”....

41. In practice, it has meant.......
Creation of new
roles
Staff training:
‘authors as
customers’
Using “existing systems and
spreadsheets”...........although
one ‘home grown’ system built
in 2011
Creation of a new author licencing
service..............
“Muddling through
and
workarounds”........
A recognition that “The
training activity is big!”

42. Reporting/Standards
Working with FundRef and
RInggold
“Can track Funder information
but..................”
“Don’t track RCUK
specifically.....”
“We’ve implemented FundRef
and do ask for grant Ids...we
support the development of
industry standards”
“We did attempt to encourage
authors to say who was
funding them but we got some
push back”
“Not our strongest point and
plan to incorporate FundRef
into our submission system”

43. Reporting/Standards: Latest report from
Research Information Network
1. There should be an annual exercise to assess the numbers
– and the proportions of the overall totals – of all articles and of those
with a UK author that are accessible free of charge from:
a. fully OA journals
b. hybrid journals
c. journals that provide free access on their platforms after an embargo period
d. repositories and other websites

44. Reporting/Standards
2. The counts of articles should distinguish between pre-prints, authors‟
accepted manuscripts, and published versions of record
3. The counts should include all articles found to be accessible free of charge,
whether they have been posted illicitly or not; but an
estimate – based on checking a sub-sample of them – should be produced of
the numbers of illicitly-posted articles
4. The counts should be based on automated searches for samples of the
articles recorded in either the SCOPUS or CrossRef databases,
plus a full census of those published in fully-OA journals
5. Searches should be made for at least four global and UK-authored samples
of articles: those published 1,7, 13 and 25 months earlier.
6. For pragmatic reasons, the date of publication should be taken as the date
of the relevant issue of the journal; but we recommend that all publishers
should include the date of publication in the metadata for all articles.
7. The results of the counts should be broken down in accordance with the
four subject panels established for the REF; but there should be
no other breakdown
(Monitoring Progress In The Transition to Open Access, March 2014)

45. Double dipping/Offsetting
“We review OA content with a
two year time lag”
“We will be talking with Jisc
about local offsets but high
administrative overhead and the
principle doesn’t make sense”
“We try to keep OA separate
from subs in our discussions”
“We have a public policy, but not
included in sales deals
negotiations as yet. Institutional
offsets will be impossible for
admin”

47. Intermediaries
“Not yet clear”
“Get regular calls but up to customer to
use”
“CCC very active.......”
“We’re not actively sampling services”
“Popping-up left, right and centre”Some concerns about
SHERPA/FACT
“Inevitable, but so far they
seem to be bits and pieces
rather than a full end-to-end
system”

50. Watching and waiting?- What 4 other European
countries had to say.....
Telephone interviews with stakeholders from The
Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Germany in March 2014

51. Denmark
• Consortium body and librarians following the UK
development; little awareness amongst academics
• Progress towards OA in ‘fits and starts’ since 2000
• Current Minister is pro OA and work will start this Spring on
a National initiative
• Believe that most publishers don’t want to pursue OA
• Will need policy from government and pressure from EU to
push the situation in Denmark forward
• Green preferred over Gold, but if Green seen not to work, a
case will have to be made for more funding

52. Austria
• Librarians and Funders very aware of UK
development; not so academics
• Austrian policy revised (Feb 2014) following RCUK
policy announcement and very similar
• Commitment from funding bodies but no quick
transition
• Concerns about administration and management
• Smaller publishers more willing to embrace, larger
ones less inclined ....”scared”.....
• Still not enough communication with academics
• Will publish results of their offset pilot with IoP

53. The Netherlands
• Secretary of State for Education letter of October 2013: all
articles OA by 2024 and 60% by 2018 BUT no extra money
being made available
• Funders very in tune with RCUK policy; not so academics
• Perception that publishers ‘took over’ the Finch work
• A view that Green is not working; a talking shop for years
but no success in engaging academics
• Librarians and funders should be stronger and negotiate
more firmly
• A belief that the larger publishers are actively delaying
progress
• Mandates are essential for progress
• Research evaluation needs to change

54. Having made these considerations. My estimate is that in 2014 some 40,000 articles and
reviews will be published by Dutch researchers. Applying the average APC of € 1087,- I
arrive at an estimated € 43,500,000,- for the Netherlands if all Dutch research would be
published in Gold Open Access journals. That figure should be compared to the current
spending on journal subscriptions in the Netherlands by Dutch Universities, which is about
€ 34 million per year Euro at the moment. Going for gold will cost therefore € 10.5 million.
That is a lot of money.

55. Germany
• Drive for change coming from research community BUT not currently
supported by government; hope that pressure from EU and The
Netherlands will change things
• RCUK policy recognised as welcome development but flawed:
- should not accept hybrid option AND should not be putting more
money into the system
• Delay tactics from big publishers who will certainly make less money in a
fully OA world
• Librarians are too conservative and cut OA budgets when under pressure
instead of subs budget
• A big bang moment is required as further incremental growth is painful
and funding funds for two models is not sustainable

56. Can a body like this one be the game
changer?

57. ...Or, will it take one
of these by a
publisher
somewhere?
....and no matter what
happens, and when.......

58. There are going to be lots more reports like this one.....

59. Thank you for your attention
All pictures from Old Pictures (www.old-
picture.com)
...and thanks to:
David Prosser
Ann Lawson
Librarians who completed the survey
Publishers for their time
Our European colleagues for their insights