Narrow thinking ignores fallout from REF open access book mandate

Extending the Research Excellence Framework’s open access requirements to long-form publications is a policy that initially seems like a good idea but unravels quickly once you give it any serious thought.

While the intention of reducing barriers to the dissemination of research is certainly noble, plans to make most academic books free to read will have lasting ramifications far beyond the remit of the REF, and we must surely question whether we wish to grant such reach to the UK’s four higher education funding bodies.

The supposed caveat softening the policy is the 24-month post-publication grace period before the open access requirement kicks in. This is presumably to avoid publishers insisting on open access payments to cover their costs upfront on the assumption that they will make the bulk of their sales from a title during the first two years. This is a big risk that I doubt many will be willing to entertain – I fully expect some kind of immediate open access payment to become standard.

This raises the question of how universities will fund those payments. One suggestion is that as all future academic books become open access, library funds could be diverted to pay for them. But hold on – just think about the consequences of this. First, it implies that libraries will stop buying printed titles, which opens up issues of accessibility and digital poverty (students without laptops at home will be disadvantaged), and there is clear evidence that reading in print leads to more information retention; is it within the remit of the REF to digitise our access to knowledge?

Campus resource collection: Unlocking the potential of open access and open research

Second, it raises the issue of curation. How would libraries help students wade through endless lists of possible open access titles online? Again, is it within the REF’s remit to fundamentally change the function and purpose of a library?

Third, what about books from non-academic publishers? At any university with an arts provision, and particularly in specialist institutions, a huge proportion of the library stock comes from trade publishers, such as Taschen or Thames & Hudson. If funds were diverted to pay for open access publication, where would the money come from to purchase non-OA titles?

It doesn’t stop there, either. What about authors? If all academic monographs are published under open access agreements, authors will receive far less in royalties. While no academic gets rich off their work, the small amounts it generates are nonetheless an important recognition of the enormous amounts of their free time that an author spends in the production of a book.

And if all books are paid for upfront (in essence, vanity publishing for academics), future sales would have no bearing on their publisher’s likelihood of accepting another, so what incentive would an author have to promote their book and disseminate its findings to the wider public?

The proposal also has enormous implications for publishers, and I ask again: does the REF have the remit to utterly rewrite the entire business model of academic publishing?

And booksellers, too – how will Blackwell’s survive, for example, if all the new books it stocks are freely available on the internet? Do we not value bookshops and the serendipitous discoveries we make in them?

Maybe I am being deliberately provocative to highlight the degree of REF mission creep. But we must ask whether it is right that what is effectively a glorified performance matrix should force such huge changes well beyond its aims and remit.

There are also much better ways of making research more widely accessible – public engagement activities, open lectures, podcasts, films, exhibitions and so on – than simply insisting that all academic books be free, which is what the academic euphemism of open access really means.

Finally, of course, if universities have to pay for a book to be published in the first place, there will be less funding available for these activities. My underlying fear is that this proposal will ultimately turn the relationships between academic authors, universities and publishers into a highly competitive marketplace, in which universities with deep pockets will push out those without, while academics will be forced to compete for institutional funding far more intensely than at present.

With the added potential to transform the function of libraries, rewrite the economic basis of academic publishing and threaten the last surviving academic bookshops, I struggle to see how this creates an environment that supports the dissemination of high-quality research.

David Lund is a historian, author and senior lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth.