Abstract
The UK Research and Innovation funding council announced its latest Open Access Policy on August 6, 2021. This policy applies to all UKRI funded research, and thus constitutes a significant move towards OA as an academic standard. For the first time in the UK, OA is to be mandated for academic books – this means that both monographs and edited chaptered books must be published Open Access from January 2024, though a 1 year embargo is permissible. As the infrastructures, business models and workflows supporting OA book publishing are currently lagging behind journals, especially in the Arts and Humanities, many researchers and institutions have responded to the policy with some consternation, even whilst supporting the aims and ethics of OA publishing. This article explores some of these apprehensions and questions raised by institutions, academics and by librarians regarding OA book publishing in a UK context, especially regarding funding and sustainability. It aims to dispel certain myths around OA book publishing in general, particularly the notion that Book Processing Charges are a necessary or even desirable element. The article then presents some of the varied models and systems currently in use and development, particularly the work of the UKRI/Research England funded COPIM project (Community- Led Open Access Infrastructures for Monographs), one of the aims of which is to build ways of delivering more sustainable revenue sources to OA publishers. It focuses in particular a key and soon to be launched output of the project: the Open Book Collective.
Highlights
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the main public body that organises research funding for UK academics
All journal articles arising from a UKRI grant that are submitted for publication from April 1, 2022 must be made Open Access (OA) immediately, with no embargo, but significantly for our purposes here the p olicy applies to monographs and chapters in edited books published from January 2024, though a 1 year embargo is permissible
Business models and workflows supporting OA book publishing are currently lagging behind journals, especially in the Arts and Humanities, many UK researchers may be seriously considering the ramifications of OA book publication for the first time, and receiving the UKRI announcement with some questions
Summary
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the main public body that organises research funding for UK academics. The COPIM project is keen to develop a solution which explores the potential of collectivisation as a way of moving away from the notion that open access content providers are in competition with one another (the real competition, from the perspectives of many of the publishers involved in COPIM, lies in the far larger for-profit publishers that dominate the landscape of scholarly communication) This is both a political position which considers cooperation, transparency and sharing as fundamental values of OA (see Bilder et al, 2020), and a pragmatic answer to some of the challenges facing OA books. Even before the UKRI policy was officially announced, concerns had been raised regarding the financial sustainability of OA book publishing, and the effects this might have on academic careers This is not new: reporting on the 2018 Knowledge Exchange Stakeholder Workshop on Open Access and Monographs.
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