Open Access publishing and the crisis in British universities
A guest perspective from historian and author Bruce Baker
Regular readers will know that I’m skeptical about the Open Access movement—the idea that the cost of publishing books should be recovered not primarily through sales to libraries and other consumers, but from some other source so that books are “free.” The movement is picking up steam quickly in the UK, where Open Access publication will soon be a requirement for most books by university-based authors. To get a better handle on the situation, I asked my colleague Bruce Baker—an American who works as a professor of history at Newcastle University and publishes widely—for perspective. I’m grateful for his guest post, which explains how Open Access is embedded in the broader Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029 and what Bruce calls an ongoing crisis in British universities.
I should preface this by saying that this is written in an entirely personal capacity. I cannot imagine that my employer, or probably the leadership of any university in this country, would agree with all of what I say. I do not pretend to be an expert in REF or Open Access, but as an American working in the field of American history in British universities for the past couple of decades, these are my thoughts on what is, or might be, happening. Parts of it are certainly wrong, but hopefully the general direction is close enough. (To understand this all in more depth, I would recommend following Glen O’Hara on Twitter at @gsoh31 or read the work on university finance by Andrew McGettigan.)
Many of you will have seen the flurry of panicked responses from British academics, especially those in the arts and humanities, a couple weeks ago when it was announced that all books submitted to REF 2029 would have to be published on an Open Access basis. I’ll try to interpret what is going on by first explaining what REF is and why it is important in British academia; second, discussing how Open Access policy has emerged in a British context and has now intersected strongly with REF; and third, why none of this matters due to a much larger structural crisis unfolding at speed in British universities that means that they will look very different by 2029 than they do in what will seem, in retrospect, to have been the “good old days” of 2024.
In mid-March 2024, REF 2029 opened a consultation about the requirements for research outputs to be considered that seemed to suggest that in order to be submitted for REF, books would have to be made Open Access within two years of the date of publication, with a few limited exceptions. Academics at UK institutions, especially in the arts and humanities and especially in disciplines such as history where the monograph looms large, went wild. A couple of days later, a slight correction was issued: trade books would be exempt.
To understand why, we need to start with REF. As with so much of British life, REF had its origins under Margaret Thatcher. In 1986, a couple years before she got rid of tenure at British universities, Thatcher put forward the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to evaluate research produced at British universities and then use that assessment as the basis for the allocation of research funding, since funding of universities was, and more or less still is, highly centralized in the UK as compared to the US. The RAE was held every three or four years until 2001, when the period of time being assessed lengthened to seven years, with the last RAE being held in 2008 before being rechristened the REF for 2014 and 2021. As the deadline rolls around, all academics with a research component in their contract (so excluding teaching-only academics) are required to submit a certain number of research outputs, such as journals and books. As a very hierarchical society, the British have a deep love of “league tables” and the evaluation of a panel of subject experts who read and rank all of the outputs are put into a league table which then determines how research funding is allocated. The rules change every time around in terms of exactly whose work has to be submitted for evaluation, how many pieces each person submits, what things other than research outputs are considered (such ineffables as “research environment” and “impact”), and so on.
Whatever good REF does, it has raised some significant problems. For one thing, the set deadline means that it lands differently for individuals depending on where they are in their research cycle and career. Changing rules on portability (taking one’s outputs along when moving from one institution to another) have created what is in football terms called a “transfer market” every few years, though without the multimillion pound salaries. REF has also undoubtedly been used as a tool for performance management of researchers within institutions, with the results that could be predicted of any outcomes-based performance management scheme: demoralization and gaming of the system.
Open Access policy seems, as so much that drives higher education policy in the UK does, to come from the medical sciences. In its earlier formulations, it was about ensuring that the data sets (and, peripherally, the papers drawing conclusions from them) arising from publicly funded research were available to other investigators as quickly and easily as possible, which makes perfect sense for many reasons. Those reasons, however, do not work so well when transferred across to the arts and humanities. Open Access was applied to journal articles in REF2021, but left books out, but now books are included for REF2029, with a few case-by-case exceptions, which are themselves likely to be the scene of many the bloody struggle in departments.
Much of the difficulty comes from money. The two main models for Open Access have been dubbed “green” and “gold.” “Green” means that the author’s final revised manuscript (before copyediting and typesetting) is made freely available online at the time of publication, usually on a somewhat obscure corner of the website of the author’s university. This has been accepted by some, but not all, publishers, but it is far from satisfactory for scholars. For one thing, it is not the version of record, and without the right page numbers it cannot really be cited by others. The clue to the “gold” version is in the name: the publisher gets paid a hefty fee (they vary, but £2500 is a good rough estimate) and makes the article available for free online when it is published. Now that this model has been extended to books by requiring them to be Open Access in order to be submitted to REF and thus of financial use to the institutions that employ the authors, the figures are likely to be much higher, perhaps £10,000.
This, of course, assumes that the publisher is interested in doing things this way. Much of Open Access policy seems to rely on the idea that the world will automatically follow the bright ideas instituted in Britain, but my impression is that this view may be based on an outdated understanding of Britain’s position in the world, even in the world of universities. Certainly a few years ago an enthusiastic attempt to get other countries to run a REF exercise (or, actually, to submit things for Britain’s REF to bestow its judgement upon) met with bemused disdain at best. For those of us whose research and main publishing outlets are in countries less driven by REF and Open Access, complying with British requirements will necessarily constrain the global reach of our work. To be clear, US-based publishers have plenty of good books to publish. They are unlikely to jump through British hoops and radically alter their business models to accommodate the needs of British-based academics. Those of us in Britain whose natural publishing outlets, due to our fields, are American will suffer, and our fields will be even more marginalized within British academia than they already are.
Where does the gold for gold Open Access come from? It is either calculated into the cost of external funding for a project, or it comes from the institution from funds set aside for the purpose, funds that are not available to pay for actual research (or paper for the photocopier, or whatever). Both the process of getting one’s hands on such funds and getting permission to apply for external funding can be subject to gatekeeping, or quality control, depending on the outcome and one’s perspective. To many, it seems that this is another throe in the slow, ugly death of what is commonly referred to now as “curiosity-driven research” and used to be known simply as research. Individual scholars are losing a bit more control of their own research.
As dispiriting as that might sound, I would hate to leave readers with the impression that the combination of REF and Open Access is going to kill the arts and humanities in British universities because I do not think that is the case. Instead, British universities as we have known them will be cold in the ground long before the submission deadline for REF2029. There is not space to get into detail here, but the crisis of funding created by the shift from funding university teaching from general funds to student loans that took off in 2012 is interacting with an economy permanently palsied by Brexit to drive institutions to the wall. The £9000 tuition fees instituted in 2012 have been increased only to £9250, when an increase that kept pace with inflation would have seen them closer to £14,000 by now. The flush years of the early 2010s when tuition fees seemed to put a lot of money in university pockets led to many ill-advised interactions with bankers from the City of London who were, it turns out, smarter about money than most of the people running most of the universities. Debts are coming due, and the cost allocation death spiral has started in earnest in many institutions. One cruel irony amongst many is that departments which did very well in previous REF exercises and in the NSS (National Student Survey—no, I don’t want to explain, just imagine the worst and that is a good start) are being thrown on the scrap heap. Experienced, dedicated, world-leading scholars and teachers are limbering up their burger-flipping muscles. The whole thing is rather depressing.