Angry publishers debate OA monographs at IPG

Angry academic publishers held an emergency meeting at the IPG spring conference yesterday (8th March) to debate the Higher Education Council for England's plan to demand that monographs be published Open Access to qualify for the 2027 Research Excellence Framework, or REF.

HEFCE's head of policy Steven Hill answers questions on the controversial plan in an in-depth interview in this week's issue of The Bookseller.

At the IPG meeting, scheduled at short notice, Peter Clifford of Boydell & Brewer warned of the policy's dangers to scholarly output. "We work a lot with early career academics, helping early PhD students into careers in writing and publishing, and it concerns me it is going to in all probability introduce a paid-for culture into this publishing," he warned. "Whereas at the moment decisions are all made on peer review and the market, [with the introduction of the OA policy] people who have got ready access to funding will get published, but those without institutions behind them or access to funding won't."

Ivon Asquith, chair of Edinburgh University Press, argued that HEFCE might have to backtrack on the policy. "Why give [research] away to overseas countries where the taxpayers haven't funded it, when you can get them to pay for it? The government is telling universities they must have economic impact. It's absurd they haven't thought it through and couldn't HEFCE easily change their mind?" he asked. Asquith also criticised the policy's impact on crossover books with general interest, asking: "Are they saying authors in the humanities like Simon Schama and Mary Beard won't feature in the assessment of quality [because their trade publishers won't publish them Open Access]? Or are they saying we should give Mary Beard's books away? It's absurd."

Princeton University Press' Sarah Caro said that she had talked to academics since the plan was confirmed at the University Redux conference last month and "there is a strong feeling within the academic community that one bureaucratic institution is having an impact on their freedom to publish where they want." Since almost all US university presses do not offer Open Access, academics who wished their work to be credited to the 2027 REF would be forced to choose another option. "They feel strongly they should publish with the publisher who is best for their book and with the editorial support and the profile they want," Caro said. "It feels like an attack on the whole publishing industry."

She added that the new system would also be "screwing the universities, because they will have to take money from research to fund publication."

Alex Pettifer of Edward Elgar noted that if an Open Access embargo period is employed, "In principle that is fine, but a lot of content is sold in bundles and you can't really include a book if two years down the line it will be freely available [via OA]."

Several publishers criticised HEFCE's lack of communication on the issue, saying that that Universities UK's Open Access Co-ordination Group was "not working" as a communication tool to all but the select few publishers involved, and that academics also hadn't been properly informed. Edinburgh UP m.d. Timothy Wright said: "HEFCE has said this is their policy and that they have informed universities; I know that in Edinburgh there has been no communication with academics." Adrian Driscoll of Goldsmiths Press said it was "frustrating" that HEFCE had come to this stage in policy-making without wider input from publishers. He commented: "I think there has been an attempt not to let people critical of Open Access get involved in this earlier."

The IPG's academic correspondent Richard Fisher, vice chair of the board of trustees for Yale University Press, confirmed that the IPG was going to make an approach to its members to compile a concerted response to the HEFCE plan, including a meeting with Hill.

He commented: "The core problem is that to someone like Steven Hill, academic publishing means Elsevier, with their size of profits, but there is a much broader church in the arts and social sciences, where this is going to be felt most painfully." He added: "The truth is, 99.5% of authors have zero interest [in OA]."

Deputy editor of The Bookseller Benedicte Page discusses the issue here.