Open access rules for trade books would hit HE impact and reputation

The feeling of seeing your book in Waterstones is unforgettable for many scholars – especially if it reaches the hallowed table by the door. More than that, a crucial part of the job involves shaping understanding, engaging audiences and showcasing innovative research. It is what many of us are expected to be doing.

Earlier this week, some academics feared all this could be a thing of the past. Academic Twitter went into one of its periodic venting modes. The REF Open Access consultation launched and, to the surprise of many, proposed that trade books be made freely available within 24 months of publication. It seemed ill thought through, not least by diverging from UK Research and Innovation’s wider open access policy, which maintains exemption for trade books.

To be clear, open access is a good thing and there are powerful arguments to be made in favour of radical disruption of traditional publishing models, especially of exorbitant academic journals. When it comes to trade books, however, this was a classic case of the best intentions having harmful unintended consequences.

Academics were right to be concerned. Such a stipulation would have left the history sections of bookshops narrower in scope and the preserve of an increasingly select few authors, often with private resources. A commercial publisher would surely not allow a book to be uploaded for free so soon after publication, bearing in mind the paperback might only have come out 18 months after initial publication. They would surely, with some justification, say thanks but no thanks and commission a bankable non-academic author instead.

And while some academics would still write trade books that don’t contain original research but are intended to elucidate their subject to a wider public (preferably from the front table in Waterstones), why would anyone put their original research into a trade or crossover book if it has no REF value given career incentives and promotions criteria?

This disincentive would be especially strong if cash-strapped universities became less willing to fund research activity for a book that wouldn’t be “REFable”. Yet while trade books may have made up only 9 per cent of long-form publications submitted to REF2014, they have an outsized wider value and impact. Pushing academic historians out of the commercial market would have meant that innovative and rigorous books went unwritten and diverse voices went unheard by the wider public: a truly perverse outcome for an exercise that expressly prioritises impact and a spectacular act of self-sabotage for academia at a time when our societal value is not recognised as widely as it perhaps should be.

Within just 24 hours, Research England, which administers the REF, issued a clarification in which common sense prevailed. In perhaps the shortest-lived consultation period of all time, suddenly trade books are proposed to be exempt from open access requirements after all. Whether this was a chaotic climbdown in response to the venting on social media or correcting an oversight (or both) is unclear but, either way, it is a huge relief to many authors.

We should be celebrating trade books and their authors, not disincentivising them. We should recognise the value they add to our cultural life and the reputation of our universities, not rebalance away from them as part of another well-meaning but misguided attempt to prevent what Research England has called a fixation on academic scholarly publications. Trade books might not be free but they are accessible, widely available and, perhaps most importantly, easily discoverable.

Wider challenges regarding open access and long-form publications undoubtedly remain. Although other models are emerging, traditional academic publishers charge thousands of pounds in book processing charges to cover the cost of gold open access; Routledge prices start at an eye-watering £10,000 per book. Universities simply do not have the money.

This could lead to an elitist situation where only scholars at one or two wealthy universities were able to publish in this manner, with open-access publication rationed everywhere else. A lucky few would have external funding to cover (most of) the charges, but this would just add to the unfairness towards those – through no fault of their own – without such funding, with serious EDI implications.

A move towards disruptive, community-led open access models for publishing academic monographs offers promise but requires more buy-in from risk-averse academics (who still equate quality with traditional prestige presses) and would be unlikely to match the discoverability of trade books anyway.

Besides, these are wider issues in a time of seemingly permanent flux. For now, and despite the early confusion, it is undoubtedly positive news that trade books again seem to be exempt from open access stipulations. Let’s celebrate their value and keep it that way.

Rory Cormac is professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham.