Things continue to move apace in the world of open access publishing. The ‘Funders and Authors Compliance Tool’ (FACT) is now available in beta at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/fact/, and allows authors to check whether a particular journal meets the requirements of their research funder – provided the latter is one of the UK Research Councils of the Wellcome Trust. Good news for researchers struggling to navigate the murky world of funders terms and conditions and publishers’ agreements.
RCUK have also revised their open access policy for the second time, and added a series of FAQs. One of the more interesting answers within the latter is that ‘the decision on which route to follow [Gold or Green] remains at the discretion of the researchers and their research organisations’, addressing
Finally, I came across an interesting commentary by Kent Anderson on the Royal Society for Chemistry’s ‘Gold for Gold’ approach to open access publishing. I’m not quite as cynical about it as he is – the article overlooks the fact that many academic institutions will already have a site license to all of the RSC’s journals, and so the voucher codes offered are at no additional cost – but it does illustrate how publishers are coming up with a range of innovative ways to link together their subscriptions and APCs.