TAKE 5 With PALOMERA partners –  Jisc

The “Take 5 with PALOMERA partners” is a blog series featuring the members of the PALOMERA project; you can get to know them in 5 questions and a quick read! 

The PALOMERA project is dedicated to understanding why so few open access funder policies include books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this situation. PALOMERA is funded for two years under the Horizon Europe: Reforming and Enhancing the European R&I System. In December, we talked with Jisc’s Director of licensing, Caren Milloy.

5 questions

1. Caren, can you tell us a little bit about yourself as an organisation and your role in it?

Jisc is the UK’s digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education and research and innovation. We are a not-for-profit organisation and believe education and research improve lives and that technology improves education and research. We provide managed and brokered products and services, enhanced with expertise and intelligence to provide sector leadership and enable digital transformation.

As Director of licensing, I am responsible for directing Jisc’s negotiations and licensing activities to deliver value for UK universities and further education institutions. Jisc negotiate and license content and software that directly supports the education and research ambitions of our members and customers. Our negotiations are governed by our strategic groups and driven by the requirements of members, ensuring we deliver cost savings and administrative efficiencies. We have a strong focus on data – utilising intelligence to drive negotiations and providing analytics to enable members to make evidence-based decisions about their collection development. As experts in our field, we are working to support the implementation of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy. 

Caren Milloy, Director of licensing at Jisc

2. Why do you think the PALOMERA project is relevant and timely?

The policy landscape within the UK is fast developing. The Wellcome Trust already expects all original scholarly monographs authored or co-authored by grant holders as part of their grant-funded research to be made freely available within six months of the official final publication date.

From 1 January 2024, monographs will be in-scope of the UKRI open access policy, and there also will be commonality between this policy and the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2028. 

The PALOMERA project aims to understand the policy landscape for open access books across the European Research Area (ERA) and provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for open access books. We feel that, given the new UKRI open access policy and formulation of the new REF policy, participation in the PALOMERA project is very timely indeed and will be of mutual benefit to Jisc, its members and stakeholders. We also hope that our experience of implementing an open access books strategy in the UK will be of use to our colleagues across the rest of the ERA.

3. What is Jisc’s role within the project?

As a partner in PALOMERA, Jisc is working across all work packages in the project.

We have been supporting colleagues at IBL PAN and other project partners by collecting documentation (policies and contextual material) for funders and institutions in the UK and Ireland, which will form part of the PALOMERA knowledge base.

We are also supporting colleagues at Hanken School of Economics as part of the funder and institutional policy mapping analysis. We contributed  to the design and dissemination of the survey of key stakeholders, and interviews with colleagues in the UK and Ireland to obtain in-depth contextual knowledge.

Finally, we have, and will continue to do so for the duration of the project, contribute to and support PALOMERA at their Funder Forums.

4. The UKRI open access policy for long-form outputs goes live on 1 January 2024. In your opinion, how will this policy affect the OA book landscape?

By extending open access requirements to long-form outputs, UKRI will ensure there is public access to, and opportunity for, impact from all outputs arising from publicly funded research.

While the open access landscape for monographs is certainly less mature than for short-form research outputs, we hope the policy will give momentum to the transition to open access for books.

As well as being used to pay the Book Processing Charges and Chapter Processing Charges often used by major medium-large sized commercial and university publishers, UKRI’s fund of £3.5 million (per annum) will also support alternative open access publishing models, such as diamond open access.  Jisc’s approach to negotiating monograph agreements focuses on the diamond model, with an emphasis on working with scholar and community-led not-for-profit presses to support bibliodiversity. We believe that a focus on the diamond model will benefit the wider transition to open access books as well as complying with the UKRI open access policy. We hope this will also begin a shift to more equitable business models in the UK and further afield.

5. How do you see things evolving after 2024 and once the PALOMERA project finishes? 

We hope that the actionable recommendations of the project will assist in the wider inclusion of long-form publications in Research Performing Organisation’s open access policies and the inclusion of books, particularly book chapters, in institutional rights retention policies. We also hope that funder policy alignment will help publishers and institutions establish smoother workflows and processes to allow compliance.

Finally, regarding monitoring and compliance of open access book policies, we would like to see the development of an open infrastructure to underpin funder policies and to allow the flow of open metadata between all stakeholders.

To get to know more about the PALOMERA project: visit the project’s page. 

This series is produced by the Work Package 5 team from the PALOMERA project. Stay tuned for the next posts coming soon!