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in the form of subscription cancellations. But publishers have strong concerns about the possibility that funders might introduce further limits on the restrictions on access that they allow in their terms and conditions of grant. They believe that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to six months, especially if it were to be combined with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence that would allow commercial as well as non-commercial re-use, would represent a fundamental threat to the viability of their subscription-based journals.
8.29. We cannot resolve all these tensions. But we endorse the conclusion of the Open Road report[1] that policy-makers should be cautious about pushing for reductions in embargo periods and in other restrictions on access to the point where the sustainability of the underlying publishing model is put at risk. If dedicated funding is not provided to meet the costs of APCs, and researchers cannot therefore publish in open access or hybrid journals, we believe that it would be unreasonable to require embargo periods shorter than twelve months. On the other hand, where successful accommodations can be reached, as in the relationships between publishers and large subject-based repositories such as PubMedCentral and ArXiv, each can work alongside each other in an environment where they each have distinctive roles; and the repositories can become an important feature in the daily workflows of researchers and others interested in research results.
8.30. For universities, it would make sense to exploit the institutional repositories they have established to best effect. Further investment is required to develop an infrastructure which supports easy discovery and navigation across repositories and their contents. In order to address these problems, we recommend that further steps should be taken to develop
- i. more effective interoperability, metadata standards, and search and navigation facilities;
- ii. interaction between funders, publishers, universities and research institutions in facilitating deposit of publications;
- iii. linkages between repositories and research information management systems; and
- iv. awareness and use of repositories and their contents by people and organisations beyond the research and HE communities, especially those with poor levels of access at present.
8.31. With the benefit of further investment to develop the infrastructure in this way, and better co-ordination between funders, universities and publishers, repositories could have a valuable role to play not just within universities, but also in a number of areas of the broader research communications landscape. These include
- ↑ Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, RLUK, JISC, 2011
