• Jane Holland, Dick Willis, David Parsons
• Joint Information Systems Committee

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09 November 2011Knowledge transfer from the higher education (HE) and further education (FE) sectors has been a long-standing issue for public policy. With increasing technological possibilities, there is interest in how ‘Open Access’ publication may provide greater potential to stimulate impacts from HE research and scholarly study and in particular for innovation and upstream technology transfer. Wider European research has already shown some utility and impact for Open Access in the private sector and this study now seeks to review the position in the UK.

Open Access (OA) publishing has been a feature of research dissemination for two decades. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) briefly defines OA as constituting ‘free availability and unrestricted use’ but also recognises differences between OA providers in the extent to which permission barriers are removed. A simple distinction has been made between ‘Gratis’ OA, which removes only price barriers, and ‘Libre’ OA, which removes price barriers as well as (at least some) permission barriers. Cutting across this, there are two accepted models of Open Access. The first, ‘Gold’ OA, involves peer-reviewed publication in an Open Access journal where all costs are borne by the disseminating parties – enabling others to have free access. This includes some major ‘open’ publishers such as the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central.

The second model, ‘Green’ OA, involves publication in an institutional (eg Harvard University’s DASH) or subject (eg Cornell’s arXiv) repository. Compliance with the Open Archives Initiative standards ensures that repositories are interoperable, with some possibly providing ‘post-print’ access, others ‘pre-print’ only, and some providing a mixture of both. Such repositories do not carry out peer review themselves but normally host articles that have been peer reviewed elsewhere, with a majority of publishers now giving permission for Green OA, although often with embargoed periods before OA publication is possible.