Abstract
In the context of the recent debate about the movement towards a monographs mandate for the UK, this opinion piece considers the logic of ‘decoupling’ that underlies it. It also looks at the real opportunities to improve on the current extraordinarily durable high-price system for publishing long-form research. Thinking around decoupled monograph publishing has positioned academic authors as the individual consumers of diverse publishing services (a wide array of which are fast emerging) in the face of significant scholarly caution. Furthermore, a danger of renewed market dominance by price-makers in an open access environment remains, with the risk of inequitable outcomes that may mirror problems that have arisen in journals. Opportunities may also arise for new local initiatives, especially collective and community-based publishing, with academic libraries likely to be in the middle of a fast-changing and contested environment for publishing monographs.
Highlights
In the context of the recent debate about the movement towards a monographs mandate for the UK, this opinion piece considers the logic of ‘decoupling’ that underlies it
Opportunities may arise for new local initiatives, especially collective and community-based publishing, with academic libraries likely to be in the middle of a fast-changing and contested environment for publishing monographs
Others, according to tweets by Horne and from audience members, interpreted Hill’s presentation as an attack on the role of academic publishers’ commissioning function and the monographs industry itself, especially the commercial sector. This unusually robust reaction referencing diverse interpretations of the greater good should in no way disguise the fact that this debate concerns the routing of funding for monographs and jobs in academic publishing
Summary
2018 saw a more than usually intense conference season in the UK notable in part for the – dare I say it – historic restatement[1] by Steven Hill of Research England HEFCE) of Research England’s intention to mandate open access (OA) monographs in the. 2027 Research Excellence Framework (REF) that is to commence in 2021. His presentation took place at the highly visible setting of the second University Press Redux conference in London. This was further clarified in a blog post[2] indicating in his view that there could be many routes to OA monographs, the precise elements of which he was open-minded about – or, as he signalled at the event itself, ‘kind of agnostic’
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