Impact of Social Sciences – What does the future hold for academic books?

"While there is general acceptance among academics about the many benefits of open access, we found much confusion and anxiety about the open access agenda and the policy that open access for books will be mandated for the REF from the mid-2020s. Jubb (2017) details the many benefits and challenges; accordingly, we wish to endorse Crossick and the 2016 OAPEN Report when they suggest that open access should proceed cautiously. It also seems that the publishing world is far from ready to move into Gold open access for monographs in time for the mid-2020s; that Green open access, while possible, will only be able to offer accepted manuscripts for access rather than published versions, and that actually finding what is available in repositories is likely to be a problem."