As most UK academics now know, there is a proposal to require long-form research outputs like monographs and book chapters in the arts and humanities to be made open access within 24 months of publication. This has arisen as a consultation in advance of REF2029, and the decision will inform eligibility criteria for submission of outputs and entitlement for QR support. There has been a lively back and forth on Twitter, and more detailed arguments for and against open access for ‘long-form outputs’ have also appeared on the HEPI blog recently.
The case for OA was presented by Stephen Curry, Dorothy Bishop and Martin Paul Eve and focuses on making research accessible to a wider audience and providing accountability for public money. The cost is estimated to be £96 million over the period of the REF cycle and they suggest this should be covered by REF QR funding.
Objections came in a reply from Patrick Grant, Tanita Casci and Stephen Conway who claim the huge costs of OA are not commensurate with value and that it drives us to a compliance-centered view of research rather than an approach with excellence at its centre. They argue we should be encouraging the best outputs, not selecting on the basis of unhelpful criteria.
Another commentator, Sam Moore, endorses less bureaucratic outlets like Open Library of Humanities and a number of new OA university presses, while favouring a voluntary approach whereby the author judges for themselves the appropriacy of OA for their work, rather than being driven by ‘a culture of compliance’.
The main problem, as I see it, is that Open Access is open for the reader, but ruinously costly for the author. For some years we have had article processing charges, and we now have book processing charges (BPC). BPCs start at around £10,000 pounds at Routledge and Palgrave at £11,600 while Cambridge University Press is too shy to publish its costs. The last time I published a book, the process was free – disregarding my own and my co-author’s labour of course. Nobody ever expected to get rich on royalties except for a few fortunate academic superstars, but it does seem offensive to expect us to furnish these considerable fees just to maintain the current punishing career expectations.
In my view, it should be possible for academics to publish their work and not be out of pocket, just as I was able to during my career. 30 years ago, the REF provided essential new money which supercharged arts and humanities research in the UK, especially in the new universities which historically had not been well funded for research. After all, nobody expects to have to fund work which is part of their job description (assuming you are fortunate enough to have a contract which specifies research in 2024). Even as a very junior academic, I didn’t have to go and grovel to a head of department, research manager or associate dean to plead for money to disseminate my research. This ideal has already been undermined, as only a minority of scholars now experience the fortunate research context that I did. Most people starting careers, or who are contingent, teaching-only or unaffiliated scholars will not be beneficiaries of REF QR money and some will not have research specified in their contracts. Surely, the function and assumed value-for-money of QR funding is to support the development of research, rather than to finance some inflated business model for publishing the end product.
That leaves the option of applying for a research grant within which you can budget for prospective publication fees. But first you need to win the grant and most have a success rate of about 25%. You can improve your chances by making a case that your work fits the priorities currently adopted by the research funding body, adding yet another tier of selectivity. If that route fails, then you are stuck in a UoA-code lottery as you bid to be one of the department’s privileged beneficiaries for your OA monograph. It all sounds very restrictive and indeed, bias in the selection of outputs submitted for assessment is a concern raised by Grant, Casci and Conway. But in any case, given the usual levels of top-slicing of REF funds and the state of university finances, the suggestion that universities would apply their QR money to this end is fanciful – who would make the decision between a biography of George Eliot over Frontiers in Queer Theory over Siege Warfare in the Crusades? It’s an invitation to impose judgements which reflect prejudice and corporate reputational concerns over academic quality. The purpose of the REF is to audit a snapshot of research throughout the UK, and it cannot meet that challenge if some scholars can’t even raise the pay-to-play funds.
I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Martin Eve who has done so much pioneering work to promote OA. He questions how the arts and humanities can justify the public spend if nobody can read their work. This is a valid point. Books from academic publishers often retail at £100-£200. But we should, perhaps, be careful what we wish for, as an undiscerning audience, mediated by a hostile press, can often be extremely judgemental about work in the arts and humanities. Who remembers the manufactured outrage over Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 ‘Jane Austin and the Masturbating Girl’, or Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ which launched unleashed the first culture wars in the 1990s.
I agree with Martin Eve that as an independent scholar I reap considerable benefit from being able to freely access very recent research without requiring affiliation to a library with expensive subscriptions. But as a scholar on a fixed income, I’m excluded from publishing in UK outlets. That’s OK, I’m not in an academic post trying to build a profile or submit to the REF. I’m happy to be out of that. But still, is that all there is to research in the humanities in 2024? Is that really what we want it to be all about as a community of scholars? Yes, there is Open Library of Humanities and that remains peer reviewed and interdisciplinary. Unlike PlosOne for the sciences, it does not levy article processing charges as it is supported with subscriptions. But, in time, this may diminish the role of niche journals which offer many beginning scholars an academic community and mentorship from like-minded researchers.
There are certainly gains from OA. It might be the best chance to dilute the excessive credence placed on metrics and journal impact factors if there is more equitable access to publications, and the wider academic community is able to judge their significance, rather than devolve that task to a triad of reviewers.
There have been complaints for a while that later iterations of the REF have progressively overseen the devaluing of monographs and outputs other than journal articles in high impact journals. This has not served the arts and humanities well. There have been undesirable consequences to having slavishly followed the science model of research and publication; it has been rather like trying to make the Chinese language fit the grammatical patterns of German. Any proposal which circumscribes the agency and academic judgement of individuals, and impedes the thriving culture of ideas, should be monitored very carefully in terms of its affects.
Aside from mere compliance culture, I worry that we are yielding power to the government to dictate, via the research funding councils, the research agenda under the guise of value for money and economic necessity. It would inevitably diminish curiosity-driven research and hand yet another cudgel to managers who would probably come to regard books and chapters with even less esteem than they do presently.
Academic Irregularities 
Hi Liz, thanks for this. You’re bang on as usual. OA is an issue I was sounding warnings about a decade ago. I reproduce one of the articles, which I have now posted on my Substack, below: note #7. See also my earlier piece here. Not at all pleased to be proven right. See below.
Derek’s SubstackDashboard
More on Open Access: HEFCE brings out the big REF stick
DEREK SAYER
MAR 04, 2013
HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England), the body that funds and oversees English universities, has asked for responses for its proposals to allow only papers that meet its criteria for “Open Access” to be submitted to the next Research Assessment Exercise (REF), the periodic review that determines how much research funding each university receives. Here is my response:
Open Access and post-2014 REF
1. I am not opposed to Open Access (OA) in principle, and I can see the long-term benefits of its universal adoption within academic publishing—at least for scientific articles and papers. The argument is less convincing when it comes to books. But it is very far from clear to me how the UK can benefit from unilaterally moving to OA outside the framework of an international agreement, when the market for academic research is a global one. Against this background, I believe the proposed routes and timetables for OA adopted by the UK government, RCUK, and HEFCE are dangerous for British academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, I believe that the proposal to use the REF as a disciplinary tool for achieving OA aims is a huge mistake that could have appalling long-term consequences.
2. Following the Finch Report, you argue “in the long term, the gold rather than green route may be the most sustainable way to deliver open access.” In the present funding context, the gold route (in which author pays APC, output is immediately available to public) has serious disadvantages. At an estimated £1500 per article, few academics will be able to afford to pay APCs themselves. They will therefore depend upon their institutions to do it for them. HEFCE has made clear that there will be no additional funds given to universities to cover these costs. It seems extremely unlikely that there will be funds available to cover APCs for all articles produced in British universities and accepted for publication. Some will therefore not now be published, or at least not published in venues admissible for the REF (unless they are published as green OA). Far from the products of research in British universities being more easily available to the public, therefore, some proportion of those products may not now be available to the public at all—not for reasons of quality, but for reasons of cost. I don’t see how this is of advantage to anybody: funders, researchers, or consumers.
3. In some ways even more disturbingly, so long as funds are not available within all universities fully to support the costs of APCs for all researchers, there will have to be some rationing mechanism developed for the use of such funds as there are. You do not have to be an Einstein to imagine the viciousness of the dogfights over these funds—between universities, between disciplines, between colleagues—that are likely to result. Nor does it require much imagination to identify the likely losers: early career scholars, especially those on sessional contracts, retired faculty, individuals working within lower-ranked and worse funded universities. More generally, what gets published will now be susceptible to all the factors that determine the allocation of budgets between and within universities, including disciplinary hierarchies, university managers’ strategic priorities, institutional politics, and personal rancor. It might be worth mentioning here that the four papers Albert Einstein published in 1905, which by common consent laid the foundations of modern physics, would likely never have seen print under gold OA: he did not have a university post at the time, but worked as a (not very well paid) clerk in the patent office in Berne.
4. Notwithstanding the current inequalities between institutions, hitherto in the UK a researcher’s chance of his or her paper being published has depended entirely upon journals’ processes of peer review. Under these proposals, not only will the range of publication venues be narrowed by HEFCE and RCUK—in ways that could impact very negatively on individuals’ careers if leading international journals published outside the UK do not go down the OA route. Universities will be the gatekeepers to the funds a faculty member needs in order to be able to afford to publish his or her work at all in venues approved by HEFCE and RCUK. It is here that tying the REF to OA is most dangerous, because not being submitted in the REF—whether because of having published in “the wrong place,” or because a university was unwilling or unable to fund the APC—may cost researchers promotion or even, in the extreme case, their jobs. Given the importance of publication at every stage of an academic career, it is difficult to conceive of a more serious threat to academic freedom.
5. For all the reasons given above, I believe that green OA (materials deposited in an institutional repository and made freely available after an embargo period) is much preferable to gold. However, I am not sure, in the long run, that the embargo period central to green OA is workable. If it is too long, funders won’t accept it as true OA. If it is too short, the risk is that libraries will not continue to pay subscriptions for journals whose contents will become freely available online within a year or two anyway. Here differences between disciplines become crucial. In the sciences a two-year embargo will usually be well into, if not well past, an article’s “half-life.” In the humanities, where the typical wait for a journal article to be published is two years, it will only just be beginning to be cited at the point it comes off embargo. Green OA avoids the patent inequities and threats to academic freedom that accompany gold in the UK funding context. It runs the risk, however, that many journals, especially in the humanities, may be driven out of business if embargo periods are too short, with a consequent further restriction of opportunities for academic publication. This is most likely to affect smaller, independent journals published by learned societies (thereby jeopardizing funding for those societies’ other activities). It is also likely to inhibit the emergence of new journals, to the academic community’s detriment.
6. The advantages of OA are most obvious for the natural sciences, where the paper (often short, often multi-authored) is the most common vehicle of publication, the half-life of papers is relatively short, and journal subscription costs are high. But none of these conditions obtain in large areas of the humanities and some areas of the social sciences, where books are equally common vehicles of publication, the half-life of publications is much longer, and subscriptions are generally cheaper. In History, the monograph—generally single authored—remains the “gold standard” of research publication, while chapters in edited collections are as common as journal articles. I do not accept the argument that “research in all subjects has equal importance and therefore equally merits receiving the benefits of open-access publication.” This would be true if and only if the form of OA adopted takes into account the requirements of the relevant disciplines. The proposals set out in Open Access and Submissions to the Research Excellence Framework post-2014 fail to meet this test. In mandating a model tailored to the publication requirements of the natural sciences, you risk seriously jeopardizing publication opportunities in other disciplines.
7. Where this refusal to take sufficient account of disciplinary differences is clearest is in the paper’s woefully inadequate discussion of monographs. You recognize that “there may be some exceptions during this transitional period” (para. 17), of which the monograph is one. You express hopes that OA will proceed more gradually with regard to monographs (para. 22), while recognizing that “we are at present some way from a robust and generally applicable approach to open-access publication for monographs.” You ask for advice on whether this anomaly is best handled by treating the monograph as an exemption or “specifying that a given percentage (for example, 80 per cent) of all outputs submitted by an institution meet the requirement [of OA compliance].” I would emphatically reject the latter: any such quantification is wholly arbitrary, and ignores variations in disciplinary mix across institutions. But what I find more disturbing is the presumption that in monographs as in papers OA is the inevitable and desirable future. My own book The Coasts of Bohemia, published in 1998, has now sold over 14,000 copies. I very much doubt it would have done so had it not had the distribution and publicity machinery of Princeton University Press behind it. Simply to dump a text in a repository is not, in and of itself, to widen public access to the products of academic research. In the humanities, at any rate, if OA drives such presses out of business, it will be the public that is the loser because our writings will be languishing in repositories, to be read only by specialists, instead of being actively marketed by knowledgeable and committed publishing houses.
8. Finally, I believe there is disingenuousness right at the heart of this proposal. The REF purports to be an exercise that assesses the quality of research being produced in UK universities, and as such determines QR funding. It has been a mantra of the REF in all its previous indications that quality is evaluated independently of venue of publication—were it not, panels would not have to read outputs and evaluation could all be done on the basis of bibliometrics alone. HEFCE is now proposing to use the REF for another purpose entirely, that of furthering the cause of Open Access. Irrespective of the intrinsic merits of the latter, to exclude from the REF all research that is not published in OA-compliant journals, no matter how excellent it is, or how internationally eminent the venue in which it appears, is in flagrant contradiction to the stated aims of the REF itself. Instead of a framework intended to facilitate research excellence it threatens to become a disciplinary tool designed to force academics to publish their work not in the best or most appropriate international venues for their discipline, but in venues that advance an unrelated political agenda. This is a bullying and shortsighted travesty of everything HEFCE stands for.
Derek Sayer, FRHistS, FRSC Professor of Cultural History, Lancaster University Professor Emeritus (Canada Research Chair), University of Alberta March 3, 2013
The HEFCE document to which I am responding may be accessed at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2013/name,78750,en.html
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Thanks for reading and commenting. It seems we are no further on in addressing the points you made prophetically 12 years ago.
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