More on Open Access: HEFCE brings out the big REF stick | coastsofbohemia

"HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England), the body that funds and oversees English universities, has asked for responses for its proposals to allow only papers that meet its criteria for 'Open Access' to be submitted to the next Research Assessment Exercise (REF), the periodic review that determines how much research funding each university receives.  Here is my response: 1.  I am not opposed to Open Access (OA) in principle, and I can see the long-term benefits of its universal adoption within academic publishing—at least for scientific articles and papers.  The argument is less convincing when it comes to books.  But it is very far from clear to me how the UK can benefit from unilaterally moving to OA outside the framework of an international agreement, when the market for academic research is a global one.  Against this background, I believe the proposed routes and timetables for OA adopted by the UK government, RCUK, and HEFCE are dangerous for British academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences.  In particular, I believe that the proposal to use the REF as a disciplinary tool for achieving OA aims is a huge mistake that could have appalling long-term consequences. [2] ... In the present funding context, the gold route (in which author pays APC, output is immediately available to public) has serious disadvantages.  At an estimated £1500 per article, few academics will be able to afford to pay APCs themselves.  They will therefore depend upon their institutions to do it for them.  HEFCE has made clear that there will be no additional funds given to universities to cover these costs.  It seems extremely unlikely that there will be funds available to cover APCs for all articles produced in British universities and accepted for publication.  Some will therefore not now be published, or at least not published in venues admissible for the REF (unless they are published as green OA) ... 3.  In some ways even more disturbingly, so long as funds are not available within all universities fully to support the costs of APCs for all researchers, there will have to be some rationing mechanism developed for the use of such funds as there are.  You do not have to be an Einstein to imagine the viciousness of the dogfights over these funds—between universities, between disciplines, between colleagues—that are likely to result.  Nor does it require much imagination to identify the likely losers: early career scholars, especially those on sessional contracts, retired faculty, individuals working within lower-ranked and worse funded universities ... 4.  Notwithstanding the current inequalities between institutions, hitherto in the UK a researcher’s chance of his or her paper being published has depended entirely upon journals’ processes of peer review.  Under these proposals, not only will the range of publication venues be narrowed by HEFCE and RCUK—in ways that could impact very negatively on individuals’ careers if leading international journals published outside the UK do not go down the OA route.  Universities will be the gatekeepers to the funds a faculty member needs in order to be able to afford to publish his or her work at all in venues approved by HEFCE and RCUK.  It is here that tying the REF to OA is most dangerous, because not being submitted in the REF—whether because of having published in 'the wrong place,' or because a university was unwilling or unable to fund the APC—may cost researchers promotion or even, in the extreme case, their jobs ... 5.  For all the reasons given above, I believe that green OA (materials deposited in an institutional repository and made freely available after an embargo period) is much preferable to gold.  However, I am not sure, in the long run, that the embargo period central to green OA is workable.  If it is too long, funders won’t accept it as true OA.  If it is too short, the risk is that libraries will not continue to pay subscriptions for journals whose contents will become freely available online within a year or two anyway.  Here differences between disciplines become crucial ... 6.  The advantages of OA are most obvious for the natural sciences, where the paper (often short, often multi-authored) is the most common vehicle of publication, the half-life of papers is relatively short, and journal subscription costs are high.  But none of these conditions obtain in large areas of the humanities and some areas of the social sciences, where books are equally common vehicles of publication, the half-life of publications is much longer, and subscriptions are generally cheaper.   In History, the monograph—generally single authored—remains the 'gold standard' of research publication, while chapters in edited collections are as common as journal articles ... 7.  Where this refusal to take sufficient account of disciplinary differ