2020 UKRI Open Access Review consultation: a British Academy comment

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has, since its establishment in 2018, been the overarching body which incorporates the disciplinary Research Councils. It also incorporates Research England, responsible for the distribution of unhypothecated, quality-related (QR) block grant funding to universities in England, which is allocated on the basis of the outcomes of the periodic Research Excellence Framework assessment exercise (REF). The REF is UK-wide, and Research England manages the exercise on behalf of its fellow funding bodies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, who distribute the QR grant in their respective jurisdictions.

As one of its relatively early tasks, UKRI has sought to establish a set of clear and updated rules for Open Access (OA) for publications resulting from UKRI funding. UKRI has consulted widely over the last year and more, to see how best to draft its own formal consultation, and the British Academy has welcomed the opportunity to participate in and contribute to aspects of it. The formal consultation on OA policy in respect of outputs from Research Council grants has now begun, with the consultation document issued on 13 February 2020.1 The deadline for responses was to have been 17 April. We welcome UKRI’s decision, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, to push the deadline for responses back to 29 May 2020. We are aware that some stakeholders may still find it difficult to assemble their evidence and formulate their views in the current disrupted circumstances. We would add, given the clear signs of a major financial crisis for the whole HE sector as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, that it will be essential that UKRI does not generate any OA policies which may unduly add to the financial or workload burden on the sector.

The British Academy will in due course make its own formal submission to the consultation. But we believe that it may be helpful to set out some of the issues here, as we see them, at greater length than the consultation documents permit, focusing on matters which seem to us of particular importance for researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) disciplines. We will comment on some of the major new policies implied in the consultation document; and then, more briefly, look at some of the longer-term implications of UKRI’s proposals, concerning the ‘REF-after-REF 2021’. These are not the only issues which concern us, but they are the main ones – the others we will discuss in our formal submission, which we will also make public.