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International Open Access Week: Open Access Books

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There is a great answered question in British open access policy: what will happen to books? It has long been signalled that OA policy for the next REF, and for research funded by UKRI, will require books to be made open access. Perhaps the real question is how will books be made open access? 

The current proposal by UKRI is as follows:
  • Monographs, book chapters and edited collections that acknowledge UKRI funding to be made OA. 
  • The version of record, or author manuscript, should be made available via an online platform... 
  • ... using a maximum 12 month embargo and CC BY or CC BY-ND licence. 
  • This policy would apply to works published on, or after, 1 January 2024.
UKRI are still to decide on some issues including: definitions, exceptions (there are quite a few listed), author copyright. This policy will also inform future REF open access policy. We provided more details on these proposals and the accompanying consultation earlier this year (here and here). A final decision is now expected in 2021.

In my view the proposals back a 'mixed-economy' approach for OA Books, meaning that authors could use several routes to comply with the policy. Some will use Green OA (author self-archiving), some will pay a book processing charge to a conventional publisher to make a book OA, and others will use a specialist OA publisher or service. 

There are several specialist OA book publishers already operating in the UK. These include Open Book Publishers, Goldsmith Press, Huddersfield Univ. Press, and Mattering Press. A important policy issue is how these operations are financed, particularly over the long-term. Several models have been identified. Martin Eve, working on the COPIM project, recently wrote a blog post on this issue. He proposes that publishers use subscriptions to their back-list to fund new OA books. This is variant on the freemium model, where sales of the print version fund the production of a digital OA copy. I think we can expect to see more experimentation with funding models over the next few years.

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Our final OA conversation with a key senior stakeholder was with Lydia Topliss, Research Strategy and Policy Manager (REF Implementation), Research & Enterprise Division. Lydia has a key role to play in ensuring compliance with REF OA expectations, and she is a member of the University Open Research Group. During this conversation we talked more broadly about open access, acknowledging the importance of compliance with research funders, but also explored some of the benefits and challenges of OA.

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