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OA monographs

Critical issues in open access and scholarly communications – draft report

This blog post was written by Dr Graham Stone, Jisc Collections senior research manager.

In June, we published a blog post about the Critical issues in open access and scholarly communications one-day event, which took place at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It aimed to widen the dialogue on open access books, examining the implications of UK policy for research culture and values, the future of scholarly publishing and for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS). Academics were given centre stage in recognition of the fact that open access policy impacts researchers and universities at least as much as scholarly publishing, and because preceding events had focused on input from other stakeholders including publishers and learned societies.

The first draft of the report is now available for comment, the final version will be published in mid-September.

Key Recommendations are:

  • Develop an open access policy that recognizes and responds to the distinctiveness of AHSS
  • Involve AHSS researchers at every career stage in developing priorities for open access
  • Look beyond the gold and green models
  • Highlight values of academic freedom, equality and diversity
  • Recognize the importance of practice research
  • Reflect on open access in a global context
  • Reconsider the mandate for open access monographs in light of the significant differences between STEM and AHSS
  • Separate any mandate for open access monographs from the REF
  • Acknowledge that few UK universities can afford to cover the costs of gold open access monograph publishing
  • Re-evaluate a set of priorities and objectives for scholarly communications before developing business models to support them
  • Reject fee-based models that lack adequate funding

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