I've posted to the H-Grad list with some thoughts relevant to
postgraduates and the proposal of a collective letter to HEFCE from a
specifically grad student perspective (as a complement to subject
representation such as by AGS).

Any fellow grads in German Studies who are not on the H-Grad list and
would like to participate could email me: [log in to unmask]

All best,
Seán
Doctoral Candidate in German, Oxford

On 11 March 2013 10:01, Colvin, Sarah <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Steve and all,
>
> the Finch report isn't a solution. This paper, prepared by colleagues at
> Sussex and Cambridge, is useful as a starting point:
>
> http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/12/04/open-access-hefce-ref2020-and-the-threat-to-academic-freedom/
>
> Most if not all UK universities are already putting structures (and new
> admin staff) in place for implementing open access. If this is not yet being
> discussed with academic staff at your institution it would be worth
> beginning that conversation asap.
>
> OA has rather serious practical implications for all of us, as well as
> reflecting a Zeitgeist that places a high value on the technologies of
> reproduction and a low one on intellectual and artistic content (I may be
> able to read an article for free but I'll still have to pay AOL to get
> online to do it).
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Sarah
>
> ________________________________
> From: JISCmail German Studies List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf
> of Steve Giles [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 09 March 2013 12:07
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Subject: Re: Fwd: Call for advice on open access
>
> dear all
>
> surely the cc-by license wd be in clear breach of english copyright law as
> articulated in the copyright, designs and patents act 1988?
>
> and on the basis of what we have heard so far, presumably one part of the
> strategy shd be to check out the finch report to see if implementing its
> recommendations wd address our concerns (and those of humanities scholars in
> general)?
>
> regards, sg
>
> ________________________________
> From: JISCmail German Studies List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
> Of Dr. Helen Roche [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 10:50 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Fwd: Call for advice on open access
>
> I attended a very interesting meeting on this in Cambridge yesterday. One of
> the main problems seems to be that a system which may work well for the
> Sciences is being forced wholesale onto Humanities and Social Sciences
> disciplines, which have very different models of funding and patterns of
> publishing (hence also, perhaps, the lack of attention given to monographs
> and essay collections, which don't tend to be of so much importance in
> scientific publishing).
>
> List members may find the following informal comments by Prof. Peter Mandler
> (President of the RHS) of interest - although these were made last term,
> before some of the further recent developments, they still seem quite
> cogent. A more official version can be found at the following link:
> http://www.royalhistoricalsociety.org/RHSPresidentE-letterJanuary2013.pdf
>
> --
>
> We offer here a brief explanation of the ‘Open Access’ (OA) agenda as it now
> stands with our funders and the serious problems it throws up for humanities
> scholars in particular.
>
>
>
> The current phase of the story starts with the Finch Report last autumn
> which recommended a move to open access to the general public for all
> publicly-funded research, and which government was quick to endorse. The
> funding bodies – RCUK (the research councils) and HEFCE (which still
> provides large sums to us through the REF) – were even quicker to endorse
> specific forms of OA which Finch did not prescribe and even warned against.
> The RCUK policy is that, in effect, almost immediately all journal articles
> based on research funded by its grants (e.g. AHRC and ESRC grants) must be
> published in open-access journals. HEFCE is now considering a similar policy
> which will be applied to all journal articles eligible for submission to the
> next REF (i.e. published in the period 2014-2019 – papers which you may be
> submitting for publication soon).
>
>
>
> The RCUK policy, which will probably be the model for the HEFCE policy, sees
> the best – and ideally the only – form of OA publishing as what is known as
> ‘Gold OA’. Under this model authors (or their funders) pay an ‘Author
> Processing Charge’ (APC) to the journal upon acceptance of their paper;
> after this payment, the journal may not levy a subscription charge for
> access to the article, which will be available to anyone for free. A block
> grant is being paid to some universities (including ours) to fund some but
> not all of this charge; but of course it will be up to the university to
> decide which papers it is willing to fund, in which journals. APCs already
> set by some journals run into the thousands of pounds.
>
>
>
> If this were the only form of OA available – which is still the government’s
> intention in the longer-term – then the threats would be apparent enough.
> Decisions to publish will be made not by individual academics but by
> management committees inside universities. Postgraduates, those on temporary
> contracts, retirees etc. would find it difficult to get any funding at all,
> and might be debarred from publishing altogether. Furthermore, RCUK insists
> that ‘Gold OA’ papers be subject to what is known as a CC-BY license, which
> permits the work to be utilised for commercial purposes by third parties
> without any but the mildest of crediting; it also allows ‘derivative’ use of
> our work, i.e. it could be adapted, edited or condensed, such that it
> becomes a copyrighted work for someone else. (Note that it does not prevent
> researchers in STEM subjects from patenting the discoveries reported, which
> may be one reason why scientists are more willing to give up entirely their
> intellectual property in the paper alone.)
>
>
>
> However, the situation is complicated by the acceptance – grudging at the
> moment – of an alternative to ‘Gold’, that is, ‘Green OA’. ‘Green’ more
> closely resembles the current situation. Journals may continue to levy
> subscriptions from end-users; no charge is made to authors or their
> institutions for publication. But after an embargo period – it may be a year
> or 2 years or 3 (RCUK and HEFCE aren’t agreed on this!) – the text of the
> article must be freely available in some form (e.g. an institutional
> repository of papers, or through the journal’s website). The same CC-BY
> license is required, by commercial use by others is prohibited. ‘Green OA’
> poses fewer challenges, though still formidable ones. Will our journals be
> able to sustain subscription income under these terms? If not, will we be
> forced back on ‘Gold’ eventually, as seems to be the funders’ expectation?
> What will happen to the modest but vital sums that learned societies reap
> from subscription income (to fund postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers,
> and their own activities)?
>
>
>
> Most worryingly, even with this alternative route, UK academics will not be
> able to publish anything from next year in a journal that offers neither
> ‘Gold’ nor ‘Green’ under the appropriate license. That accounts for a large
> number of international journals that are not yet driven by UK government
> policy – some of which have already said they have no intention of doing so.
> Thus your freedom to publish is already under threat even from the temporary
> compromise of ‘Gold’ plus ‘Green’. The funders have indicated that they wish
> next to push on to OA terms for books of essays and monographs.
>
>
>
> What can we do? Learned societies in the humanities and social sciences are
> fully engaged with government, drawing attention to unintended consequences
> of a well-intentioned policy and trying to develop OA terms that everyone
> can live with. (The hardest issue to deal with is the international one – no
> compromise we agree inside the UK can possibly be imposed upon everyone
> else.) The editors of a large number of history journals, including the HJ,
> have issued a statement proposing feasible OA terms
> (http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access),
> though this again excludes many journals published by non-UK operators. You
> are encouraged to express your own views wherever you think they might be
> heard – with your learned societies, with your MP, with the university.
> HEFCE is about to launch a consultation on its proposed policy and there are
> some indications that government is having a minor rethink.
>
>
>
> On 8 March 2013 17:27, Carter, Erica <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Pól,
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you for this timely reminder that we need a response to Open Access.
>> I agree with all the points Ritchie makes about the problems for us with the
>> gold option. The issue about publishing in journals outside the UK seems
>> especially pertinent for German Studies, of course, but it's definitely
>> worrying colleagues in other disciplines. AGS members might like to know
>> that the same issue has recently been highlighted by colleagues in Film
>> Studies, in discussion on the British Association for Film, Television and
>> Screen Studies list. Leo Enticknap wrote on 28 February:
>>
>> What this (the gold option - EC) will mean is that academics working in
>> areas whose top journals are based outside the UK and/or not open access,
>> will be deterred from working in the UK higher education. It will also
>> filter through into the selection of topics for PhDs, and create a situation
>> whereby UK-based open access journals basically get to set the research
>> agenda....The two leading journals in my specialism (archival film
>> preservation and restoration) are published in Brussels and Minneapolis
>> respectively, and neither is open access.....
>>
>>
>>
>> Leo's comments may be an exceptionally grim interpretation of the effects
>> of open access (which I am personally in favour of, though not in the form
>> in which it's being railroaded through). But he does highlight issues that
>> we need surely to flag up as especially relevant to German.
>>
>>
>>
>> Erica
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Department of German
>> School of Arts and Humanities
>> King's College London
>> Strand
>> London WC2R 2LS
>> Tel:  +44 (0)20 7848 2128
>> FAX: +44 (0)20 7848 2089
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: JISCmail German Studies List [[log in to unmask]] on
>> behalf of Ritchie Robertson [[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: 08 March 2013 16:49
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Fwd: Call for advice on open access
>>
>> Dear Pól,
>> Below are some points to be made against open access. They come partly
>> from a meeting of learned societies which I attended (representing the MHRA)
>> at the Royal Historical Society on Monday. I hope you can work them into
>> your submission.
>> Best wishes
>> Ritchie
>>
>> It is abundantly clear that Gold OA, with journals supported by APCs
>> instead of subscriptions, is not suitable and would be severely damaging for
>> HSS subjects. While some HSS journals are published by large commercial
>> publishers such as Taylor & Francis, many, including some of the most
>> respected, are published by learned societies (e.g. the Modern Language
>> Review by the MHRA) that are not primarily concerned with profit. Such
>> journals will face difficulties even under Green OA.
>>
>>
>>
>> The case against APCs does not need stressing: in HSS they are likely to
>> be much higher than the Wellcome Trust’s figure of £1450 which the Finch
>> Report used as a guide, and they will be taken from research funds made
>> available by a block grant, with the prospect of huge bureaucratic
>> complications in managing internal competitions for such scarce funds.
>>
>>
>>
>> The Finch and HEFCE proposals threaten academic freedom by preventing
>> authors from publishing their work in what they consider the most suitable
>> venue (i.e. a journal with the appropriate readership); they also thereby
>> threaten the effective dissemination of work.
>>
>>
>>
>> With Green-compliant or hybrid journals, incoming articles (i.e. by
>> authors overseas) will not be a problem, but outgoing articles (by British
>> scholars in overseas journals) remain a problem. Many foreign journals do
>> not have an online presence. Those that do are unlikely to move to OA. We
>> need to press hard for an exemption (cf. §17 of the HEFCE consultation
>> document).
>>
>>
>>
>> The HEFCE document suggests that compliance with Green OA can be secured
>> by placing peer-reviewed work in an institutional repository. The problem is
>> that institutional repositories are often difficult to access. We need a
>> national platform from which all can be accessed. In addition, private
>> scholars and some ECRs do not belong to institutions.
>>
>>
>>
>> Licensing: CCBY licenses effectively allow plagiarism, since an article
>> can be ‘on the basis of’ previous work without having to identify the
>> previous work by quotation or exact references. We need NCND licensing (no
>> commercial and no derivative use). Without such a safeguard, third parties
>> are unlikely to allow their work to be reproduced (e.g. art galleries
>> providing illustrations).
>>
>>
>>
>> The HEFCE document only partially addresses the question of making
>> monographs available online. If books are made available online, far fewer
>> people will buy the print edition. This matters particularly with books
>> intended for a general audience, but all publishers need to make money, and
>> it is difficult to distinguish clearly between commercial and academic
>> publication. The issue demands much further thought.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Professor Ritchie Robertson, FBA
>> Taylor Professor of German
>> Faculty of Modern Languages
>> University of Oxford
>> 47 Wellington Square
>> Oxford OX1 2JF
>>
>> On 05/03/2013 19:35, Ó Dochartaigh, Pól wrote:
>>
>> Colleagues,
>>
>> See below. If you wish to forward comments to me by next Monday, 11 March,
>> I will try to formulate a coherent AGS response. Apologies for the early
>> deadline, but I have a very full week next week and am on leave the week
>> after.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Pól.
>>
>> Prof. Pól Ó Dochartaigh, MRIA, FRHistS,
>> Dean of the Faculty of Arts,
>> University of Ulster.
>>
>> Tel: +44 28 7012 4517.
>> Sent from my iPhone.
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>> From: The REF Team <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: 5 March 2013 12:44:27 GMT
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Call for advice on open access
>> Reply-To: Updates on the Research Excellence Framework
>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> HEFCE is inviting advice on developing the four UK funding bodies’ joint
>> policy on open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF).
>>
>> This advice will contribute to the development of consultation proposals
>> on implementing an open access requirement in the next REF exercise. The
>> consultation will run later in 2013.
>>
>> The deadline for responses to our letter is 25 March 2013. Advice is
>> welcomed from anyone with an interest in research and academic publishing.
>>
>> To read this item and the letter in full visit:
>> http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2013/name,78750,en.html
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
>