Interview answered by Sarah Roughley, Scholarly Communications Librarian at The University of Liverpool in the UK; and Matina Tsalavouta, Research and Impact Marketing and Communications Manager at the University of Liverpool in the UK.

1.    Does your organization have an open access strategy? And how are you implementing it?

Yes we do have a policy which is publically available here: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/research/our-research/research-environment/open-access-data-management/; and we also communicate regularly to the research community internally in order to raise awareness and encourage the use of the funding that we have allocated for publishing Open Access.

2.    Are you facing any challenges to integrate an open access culture in your University? If yes, what kind of challenges? And how are you overcoming them?

All institutions are facing challenges. Some of those we face are:

• Terminology – author confusion over terms like “green” and “gold”
• The “policy quagmire” – author’s being presented with a huge number of similar-but-not-the-same policies from a wide range of stakeholders, from funders to employers to publishers
• Publisher intransigence – a stubborn resistance to the fact that academic publishing has to change from its current practices.

3.    What are your open access strategy and objectives for the coming years?

• Compliance – especially with the Research Excellence Framework open access policy, which is massively important for UK institutions
• Realising benefits – perhaps paradoxically, we also need to complement the compliance agenda with a more positive and robust advocacy of the benefits to research of open access.

Both objectives require strong communication and education, particularly when presented with incorrect but stubbornly entrenched misunderstandings of open access policies and concepts.

4.    Open in order to…

…ensure that the development of new knowledge is unimpeded by obstacles that are holdovers of 19th and 20th century technological and business models.