Seb Schmoller has sent a better URL for the HEFCE REF Call for comments.
Stevan,
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/news/news/2013/open_access_letter.pdf might be easier for some people.
Seb Schmoller
I have read it all, very quickly, and it does look very promising, if I have understood it correctly:
The proposal (for the only category in which I have some expertise) is:
To mandate that in order to be eligible for post-2014 REF
all peer-reviewed journal articles submitted
must be deposited in the author's institutional repository
immediately upon acceptance for publication,
regardless of whether the article is published in a subscription journal or in a Gold OA journal
(no preference, and no restriction on author's journal choice),
and regardless of whether the publisher embargoes Open Access to the deposit
(for an allowable embargo period that remains to be decided.)
If I have understood this correctly, then there is only one ambiguity I think I see, which I think needs to be resolved very clearly:
There may be inter-discipline differences regarding the allowable OA embargo length, but there should be no inter-discipline differences at all regarding the immediate-deposit requirement itself.
(Closed Access deposit has nothing to do with publisher policy, copyright, embargoes, or discipline differences).
The proposed HEFCE REF OA policy looks much better than the current RCUK OA policy. Let us hope that the RCUK policy will now be brought into line with the proposed HEFCE REF policy.
It is also very reassuring to hear that the policy will be based on collaboration and consultation.
This may help the UK regain its former worldwide leadership position in OA. The new US policy developments (following, a decade later, in the UK's pioneering footsteps) are extremely welcome and timely, but they still have many rough edges. Let's hope it will be the UK that again shows how to smooth them out and propel us all unstoppably to global OA.