Impact of Social Sciences – Open access requirements will erode academic freedom by catalysing intensive forms of institutional managerialism

"In light of the formalisation of core aspects of the open access regime by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) on 1 April 2013, there was an interesting piece by Curt Rice on the LSE Impact blog last week. He argues that open access will enhance academic freedom. While I would agree that his argument is plausible in theory–and I have presented similar arguments in favour of open access–his position completely ignores the institutional context that is shaping how open access is being implemented in the UK. In fairness, Rice is based in Norway at the University of Tromsø. Therefore, it is uncharitable to expect him to understand and account for the pathologies of the British higher education system. Nevertheless, my argument is that open access requirements will become a means of supplementing the quotidian forms of monitoring and managerialism that plague UK universities. As discussions thus far have concentrated on ‘greedy publishers’, the value of peer review, and the future viability of disciplinary societies, I fear that the negative impacts on academic freedom catalysed by open access are going to blindside many colleagues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.  First, although HEFCE mercifully backed down from demanding that all post-REF 2014 eligible research be gold open access–i.e., authors pay journal publishers to have the accepted copy-set version of an article immediately available to the general public on a CC-BY license– gold access will catalyse more intensive forms of managerialism. Senior research managers–who invariably look for quick measures of research quality that do not require reading articles–will use gold open access publications as a proxy for quality. Their assumption will be that gold pieces must have received UK Research Council funding as there are not sufficient funds to pay for gold open access from internal sources. Given that strike rates on awards in the arts, humanities, and social sciences range between 5-20% depending on the scheme, the use of this short-hand does not bode well for most colleagues.  Second, it is often American-based journals that are considered to be the ‘best’ in individual fields based on reputation and ranking metrics. As the United States has the largest national research sector in the Anglo-European world, these measures of quality are often reflections of the size of the epistemic communities advocating for the merits of specific outlets and citation patterns within communities that reproduce ranking hierarchies. However, UK research managers have a tendency to go with ranking metrics because these make monitoring ‘academic performance’ easier for them. The position of a journal in a ranking system–generally the Thomson-Reuters ISI–is said to capture the quality of any individual research article published in the journal itself. Thus, research managers routinely pressurise academics to publish in these journals even when their areas of expertise and methodological commitments mean that the chances of acceptance are next to nil on the basis of fit–regardless of the quality of the work itself.  But the threat to academic freedom will be more pernicious with open access. I have already heard rumors from well-placed sources that US-based disciplinary journals are not going to offer open access options that meet HEFCE guidelines and/or will operate an unofficial policy of rejecting all articles from the UK that come with open access requirements. In particular, many American editors and disciplinary associations are worried that colleagues based outside of the UK will perceive gold open access as ‘paying to publish’. They are not prepared to wage the information campaign that will be required to convince people otherwise. When it comes to green open access, editors and publishers will be loathe to have to navigate the production of different licensing agreements in order to cater to UK academics. The easiest solution will be to eliminate the problem through desk rejections.  And here is where a perfect-catch 22 will arise. For those in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who have funding that will allow them to pursue gold open access, placing their work in ‘top outlets’ based in North America may well become impossible. And when they seek access to their research funds to obtain open access licenses for other outlets, they are going to have to convince sceptical research managers–who control how research monies are spent–that they should be given access to these resources. And one can only imagine the bureaucratic regime–and accompanying paperwork– that will be instituted to evaluate these requests across UK universities. UK academics–whet