Open access and the arXiv

HEFCE is dead, long live Research England(?)

This new body is responsible for the REF. Their website makes the following statement about open access:

Open access is central to UK Research and Innovation’s ambitions for research and innovation in the UK. The UK Funding Bodies, including Research England, are committed to supporting successful approaches to open access publishing through the Research Excellence Framework 2021. It is now a requirement that certain research outputs submitted to any research assessment exercise after 2014 be made as widely accessible as possible.

But we have just learned that by far the most successful repository of open access papers in our subject, the arXiv, is to be disallowed. Can they do this retrospectively? Who knows. Experience suggests that protests from the academic community, however well supported, have little effect.

Apparently the reason they gives is that there is no mechanism for linking a paper on the arXiv with the published version of the paper. It appears that they trust panel members to read papers and judge their quality, but they don’t trust them to check that the arXiv version matches the published version.

If this policy is confirmed, it is a denial of the principle in their fine sounding statement above, as well as a total misunderstanding about how open access is used by the academic community. It reinforces the view that the people judging research know little about how research is actually done.

Here, on the arXiv, is a paper arguing that arXiv publication is not only REF-compliant but better for purpose than institutional repositories. (In my case, I haven’t for many years looked on an institutional repository for a paper, but I use the arXiv very frequently.)

Final note: XKCD has had his say on for-profit journals here.

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About Peter Cameron

I count all the things that need to be counted.
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10 Responses to Open access and the arXiv

  1. Ursula Martin sent me this; for some reason the site is not allowing her to post it (I am really not sure why!)
    I don’t have time to dig into this properly, but it is being argued that the arxiv *is* compatible with the new HEFCE guidelines: https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=2115

  2. Peter says:

    To be fair, it’s not retroactive arxiv banning: this was known (at least we were told by our REF-compliance team) back in 2014. But the logic for the ban certainly escapes me.

  3. From today’s IMU newsletter:

    “CEIC wrote earlier (IMU-Net 80) about the importance of arXiv.org, saying “One of the most useful things mathematicians can do to aid their colleagues working in low-income nations, is to post one’s own work to arXiv.org”. As well as being useful to others, it can also be helpful to oneself. A study of several journals, including three mathematics ones, in a Master’s Thesis (http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4856) showed that publishing the preprint tended to make the first citations occur earlier. A more systematic study (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05238) of the Computer Science literature (where the publishing culture is much more oriented towards conferences) has shown the same. It would be good to have a similar systematic study in mathematics.”

  4. “Apparently the reason they gives is that there is no mechanism for linking a paper on the arXiv with the published version of the paper. ”

    This is false. The arXiv has a doi field in the metadata, as well as a journal reference field for a human-readable bibliographic reference. See https://arxiv.org/help/jref

    • Yemon Choi says:

      David, I suspect that by “link” they mean a guaranteed way to access the published version. A DOI will just get you there, it won’t guarantee access.

      Peter: I’m afraid I can’t say I am at all surprised by this latest development (yet one more reason I feel vindicated in my lack of pleasure when the Finch report came out and was tied to REF/RAE). I vaguely recall being told on this blog by someone knowledgeable – perhaps Martin Paul Eve? – that my institution was incorrect to say that I had to use their repository rather than arXiv in order to guarantee REF compliance, and that HEFCE rules definitely allowed arXiv. Well, here we are.

      • I think also that there is no compulsion for authors to fill in this metadata when they put the publication on the arXiv.
        I hope that there will be a big expression of discontent at this decision; at least we can feel better then. But who (apart from the bureaucrats) needs the published version, if the post-acceptance manuscript is posted? And as I said, if the panel of experts are capable of judging whether it is a good paper, they are presumably capable of judging whether it is the same as the published version (which they will have access to).

      • So the trick is for the funding body to require that repositories (of any sort, but including the arXiv) link to the final version via doi when published, which is a minor effort, rather than ban the use of repositories.

        I also like including the arXiv number of my published papers, where possible, in the abstract or a pre-paywall footnote. Just good practice to link different versions, but has the pleasant effect that the friction for those without access is lessened just that little bit.

  5. Yemon Choi says:

    David, that first suggestion isn’t going to help, because the link doesn’t guarantee the article can be accessed by The Great British Taxpayer, which was one of the loudest cries that the Finch Report was responding to, whether or not I and other academics think it was the most pressing issue. The case was never made at the time that having the essentially final version on an open repository such as arXiv would be honouring the spirit and achieve the intended aims, presumably because that model doesn’t apply so well to e.g. lab sciences as currently practised.

    I did attempt to say, back in the day, that the conflation of various people’s priorities and incentives into a bundles called Open Access Good Current Publishers Bad would lead to this kind of thing. Incidentally, the Great British Taxpayer (and less important people like me) can now read for free a rather useful article in JFA volume 13 (1973) concerning positive-definite elements of left Hilbert algebras. In the eyes of Finch etc (the report not the person) this counts as Elsevier demonstrating they are good guys now because they did some of what people asked. YMMV.

    (Snark aside, your practical step with including arXiv references is a good constructive one.)

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