By Anthony Cond and Peter Berkery
Published in LSE Impact, June 7, 2024
In this blog post, AUPresses President Anthony Cond (Liverpool) and Executive Director Peter Berkery propose a way to ensure equitable government funding for longform OA humanities and social science scholarship in the UK: use a minute portion of Research England’s quality-related research (QR) block grant funding, given to institutions, to sustain monograph publishing outright.
In other REF news: The Association has filed comments as part of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029 Open Access Consultation. This consultation seeks input as the 4 UK higher education funding bodies—Research England, Scottish Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland—finalize open access (OA) journal and monograph publishing policies and requirements for UK institutions and scholars.
The Association answered the consultation questions as it has responded to OA policymaking in the past, measuring them against our core values of intellectual freedom, equity and inclusion, integrity, and stewardship. As described in our Open Access Statement (2019), “we weigh terms, requirements, and outcomes of any project or policy against the effects on the intellectual freedom of authors and communities that may be the subject of research, as well as readers. We look to the diversity of voices who are able to take part in the scholarly conversation as well as to the diversity of readers reached by any dissemination platform. We look to the integrity of the scholarly record as it is preserved, translated, and credited. And we look to build robust systems of scholarly publishing—stewarding the resources of institutions, supporting the labor of scholarly communications, and respecting the work of researchers throughout the cycle of scholarship.”