Some personal notes on the REF OA mandate for books | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

by Martin Paiul Eve

A few personal notes on the clamour around OA for books (written from the perspective of an author of 10 books that are all openly accessible):

1. The REF mandate for books has been argued and trialed over an eight-year period, starting with the 2016 ‘Consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework’, published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. To argue that it’s been done too quickly is to ignore the fact that we have had eight years of warning and insufficient action has been taken. At the rate we’re going, I will be dead before we make books OA.

2. We costed the mandate here in 2017: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.392. The eventual cost comes to just 1.2% of QR. When awarding billions of pounds of funding, is it not reasonable to suggest that approximately 1% of it be spent on enhancing the dissemination and allowing members of the public to read the fruits of their funding? Cries from the British Academy et al. read like: please give us money and then leave us alone. Of course, the problem for REF is that most researchers don’t see any appreciable outcomes from QR.

3. Those in the humanities constantly bemoan the lack of funding for their fields. Yet, it seems, they also do little to promote (indeed, they often try to hinder) the open digital dissemination of their work. We now have a world where the value of most science is clear to see online (let alone in its applied variations of modern medicine and technologies), while most humanities work lingers invisible in expensive books. How can we expect the public to see the value of our disciplines in this environment? It also means that bad work is free to read online, while the highest quality work sits far from where most people first go when seeking knowledge: the internet.

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