Dr Gasparrini is an early-career medical researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His presentation focused on navigating the often confusing open access environment to ensure he complied with open access policy, in this case that of the Medical Research Council. In his experience, it was often a question of trading off limited funds assigned for Gold OA against a journal's reputation, as summarised by Impact Factor. Dr Gasparrini's best find was that of the Journal of Statistical Software, a fully-open access journal with an APC cost of £0, and a good Impact Factor too. Dr Gasparrini finished his presentation by pointing to the open software movement, which seems to have gotten far further towards ‘open' than scholarly communications (though there are structural and commercial reasons for this, I would argue). You can view Dr Gasparrini's presentation here.
Finally it was the turn of the funding agencies to give their perspective, in two presentations. The first was from David Carr from the Wellcome Trust, who detailed Wellcome's open access policy. Open access to research is covered by an RCUK-like policy, which emphasises Gold over Green open access. David also laid some emphasis on Wellcome's plans to better enforce already required research data management plans, which should further the open data agenda (something covered in passing, rather than in depth, by the day's presentations). You can view David's presentation here.
Last up was Ben Ryan from EPSRC, who was wearing his RCUK policy hat. Ben had the somewhat unenviable task of explaining RCUK's open access policy to an audience comprised of a large number of those likely to be critical of RCUK's policy, not least repository managers. Criticism of the policy has been well-rehearsed elsewhere, but one notable statement from Ben was that RCUK would not be prescriptive within institutions about how they complied with the policy; instead it would be down to individuals to choose, within the criteria laid down by RCUK. The possible perverse effects of the policy have also been documented (briefly, journal publishers may up embargo periods to prevent Green OA being an option); Stephen Curry, in the later discussion, noted that any publisher changing embargo periods to exclude Green OA as an option would be likely to see authors vote with their feet. Ben's presentation can be viewed here.
The day was rounded off with lively discussions. Despite being somewhat biased (I helped organise the event), I think it was a great success and a worthy and thought-provoking way in which to celebrate Open Access Week 2012.
A version of this article first featured on the City University Open Access blog.
Neil Stewart is Digital Repository Manager at City University London. He is interested in open access, digital information resources and scholarly communications.