Open and closed | TLS

"T he Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has just concluded its consultation on a seemingly arcane matter: 'Open Access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework'. People outside the insanely regulated world of twenty-first-century British academe (not to mention the vast majority of hard-pressed colleagues within it) are unlikely to have registered this little initiative. What has it got to do with the common reader? The answer, I suspect, is 'quite a lot'. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, HEFCE may have sounded the death-knell of precisely the sort of book that is introduced to a wide public by the TLS and its peers. Ironically, in the name of 'open access' HEFCE has set the academic world on a Journey back into the ivory tower. It has also published a plagiarist’s charter. Let me try to explain ... One can readily see the Utopian model. Provided the peer-reviewers get themselves organized, all academic research could be published for free on the web. Imagine: the latest findings on, say, nuclear fission or the archaeology of Pompeii or quantum computing or the manuscripts of Mozart available to anyone with an internet connection, without charge and with a few clicks of the mouse. Learning would be democratized and the commercial middlemen with their vastly inflated subscription charges could be put out of business. At the same time, a political imperative would be answered: expensive research funded out of the public purse would be given back to the public without a second charge at the point of consumption.  The intention of HEFCE is that in order to be eligible for the next 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) - pencilled in for 2020 - all journal articles and conference proceeding volumes (save for those containing commercially sensitive information) must be placed in an open access online depository at the researcher’s university ... But if you are a scholar in the humanities, your gold standard is likely to be the long-considered and deeply researched monograph, not the brisk journal article. Making a book available for free is very different from uploading a ten-page article to the Web. For now, at least, the monograph carries an exemption from HEFCE’s prescription. But that won’t be the case the next time round, which will presumably be in about 2025. HEFCE says: 'In view of our expectation that open access publication for monographs and books is likely to be achievable in the long term, we would like to make clear our intention to extend the requirement to these output types in the future, but not in the period being addressed by this consultation'. The headmaster has spoken, dear class. He has made clear his intention that in the long term you should be prepared to publish your books for free ... The logic is impeccable. Whether your 'output' (HEFCE’s unlovely term) comes from a month’s data-gathering in the lab or a lifetime’s reading in the library, your salary has been paid at least in part from the public purse, so you must give back the fruits of your labour. What’s more, you must do so in such a way that it is easy for others to make use of it, recycle it - and even pass it off as their own. The most astonishing sentence in the HEFCE prescription is this: 'Outputs should be presented in a form allowing the reader to search for and reuse content (including by download and for text-mining), both manually and using automated tools, provided such re-use is subJect to proper attribution under appropriate licensing'. Anyone for plagiarism? How much strength will that last clause really have?  Traditional publishers have long been saying that the printed academic monograph is in terminal decline. Print runs have become minuscule, price tags astronomical. There is a lot to be said for putting the genre out of its misery, or rather releasing it online. No one has quite worked out the business model yet, but a range of interested parties, from Bloomsbury Academic to Cambridge Scholars, have been making strides. It could be that the pressure of open access will throw a lifeline to the kind of highly specialized book-length study that print publishers will not now touch.

The real danger, it seems to me, is the unintended consequence for the common reader and the crossover book. The substantial work of serious scholarship with a wider reach than that of the immediate academic sub-field is a precious thing, at the core of our cultural life and intellectual discourse. But there will be no incentive for publishers to invest in such books if they are to be given away for free. And there will be no incentive for scholars to write books for broad audiences if such books are banned from the REF because they are not given away for free ... "