So you spend three or four years chained to your computer.
You read so many books and articles that your dreams start to conform to the
MHRA style guide. You have moments of pure excited joy and (usually longer)
moments of unadulterated despair. And at the end of it all, you produce your
thesis, your article, or your book.
And no one reads it. No one can,
outside a very small group of fellow-academics whose institutional affiliations
mean that they can access your work. Even institutions are not operating on a
level playing field; say half of your colleagues are from small institutions
whose libraries just don’t have a big budget, or they specialise in a subject
area very different to yours. A huge proportion of your intended audience is
already locked out from being able to discover your work. The problem is even
more acute if you’re publicly-funded. Almost everyone you walk past in the
street is contributing something to your research – but they can’t read it,
unless they’re willing to pay extortionate amounts of money to access it. And,
remember, they’ve already paid for it; their taxes are the reason you could
carry out your research to begin with.
The open access debate is not a
new one; it’s been brewing for nearly two decades. But, to talk specifically to
the UK
context, at a time when we’re being increasingly asked to demonstrate the worth
of our research to a wider audience which reaches outside the academic bubble,
the conversation about open access is heating up. This week’s JISC conference, ‘Open
Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences’, amply
demonstrated why this is not an issue we can ignore, and why it’s a
conversation that should and must be engaged with across all subject
disciplines and about all academic publishing.
The conference, held at the
British Library on July 1st-2nd, provided a rare
opportunity for academics, librarians, publishers and policy-makers to come
together, providing a space for dialogues which seem long overdue. If open
access is, as several speakers suggested, based on collaboration, this
conference set the right tone; the very active Twitter feed indicates the kinds
of conversations being had, and the need for these dialogues to continue as the
open access movement progresses.
It’s nearly exactly one year
since the Finch report
suggested how open access publishing might work in the UK. (See this
blog post from Helen Rogers for an idea of some of the issues this report
raised.) It identified two routes by which open access publishing would work:
gold, where the author or institution pays the publisher for open access
rights, and green, where the work is subject to an embargo for a set time
before it is made open access. Open access policies so far have only applied to
journal articles, but the conversation now is beginning to consider the future
of monograph publishing. Although HEFCE
confirmed at this conference that there is unlikely to be a formal requirement
for the next (c.2020) REF, they are in the beginning stages of a consultation
to consider how open access monograph publishing might be brought into effect.
At the heart of this
conference was a dilemma: how appropriate are monographs for publishing
research anyway? Jean
Claude Guédon asked this question in his opening keynote, suggesting that
we now need to find ways to go beyond
the monograph. He argued that we need to recognise that all of our research is
collaborative; even the monograph is not the work of one lone researcher, but
is instead one document entering into a society of texts. The concept of the
author-centric text is, he suggested, flawed; it implies ownership over an idea
that was, in fact, not developed in a solitary mind, but in conversation with
others – whether that be with other academics, or with your partner, your
friend, your mum, all of whom will contribute something to your thinking. And
anyway, he continued, the single-author thesis does not train us sufficiently
for the jobs we’re likely to get after it, when we will be working
collaboratively with other people. Why not collaborate on your thesis, then?
Guédon was openly indebted to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s study Planned
Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy
(2011), and indeed she reiterated many of Guédon’s points in her own keynote
later that day. Fitzpatrick went further to suggest that the academy is
organised by a vertical hierarchy, whereby established scholars self-propagate
their own ideas. In other words, if all our new work is being assessed by the
same outdated ideas, it will never get very far. Fitzpatrick argued for a move
towards a ‘horizontal’ order, whereby we are all assessed on our
trustworthiness and skill rather than out credentials. She stimulated the
discussion on the peer review process by comparing the two peer review methods
undergone by Planned Obsolescence:
‘traditional’ review, and open access, some examples of which you can see here.
She was not arguing for a complete switch to open access peer reviews, but she
did demonstrate how the two approaches might work together to produce a better
final product. She also indicated how this approach might be used for teaching
at all levels; students from across disciplines and institutions can comment
side-by-side on the same text, diversifying their conversations and engaging
them with a much wider social and critical field.
These keynotes highlighted the
broader issues at play in humanities and social sciences publishing in the
international market, and the sessions between them illustrated the specific
ways in which open access publishing might be approached. As chair Martin
Hall noted as he introduced the first panel, ‘to Finch’ might not yet be a
recognised verb, but it’s role as a noun has certainly expanded since last
year’s report. Panel 1, ‘HSS after Finch’, provided an opportunity for a
diverse range of companies and policy makers to articulate their responses to
open access publishing of monographs. Rupert
Gatti, the Director of Open
Book Publishers, received a lot of Twitter praise for his enthusiasm over
the course of the conference, and he asked the event’s key question: how can we
prove our relevance if our main outputs are not being read by the majority? It
was a question with which HEFCE are demonstrably struggling; they confirmed
that there would be no mandate for open access publishing in the next few
years, despite the growing support for it at government level in the EU, as
Carl-Christian Buhr, member of cabinet of the Vice President of the European
Commission, explained. As Caroline
Edwards suggested in the afternoon session, we risk falling into a
‘prestige trap’, whereby young scholars can’t publish open access because it
isn’t as well-recognised – but it never will be if there are no mandates for
it. These dialogues seemed to indicate that policy makers and academics are
stuck, to a degree, in a loop, whereby academics won’t publish open access
until there’s equal prestige attached to it, and policy-makers won’t mandate it
until academics are seen to be doing it.
The majority of day 2 saw
delegates split into three different strands: one for researchers, one for
librarians and one for policy-makers. The researcher strand explored practical
ways researchers might explore the possibility of publishing their monograph
open access. Ed Pentz, the Executive Director at CrossRef, introduced us to ORCID, an online researcher identity; Ernesto Priego
guided us through Creative Commons
and CC-BY licenses; Janneke
Adema suggested how to find a reputable open access publisher; Ellen Collins
explored issues surrounding funding, mandates and embargoes; Will
Brooker made the case for actively promoting your work; and Lucy Montgomery provided an
introduction to altmetrics. The main message from this strand is easily
summarised: you have the power to control your research destiny. Get on ORCID –
provide your own information so that people looking for you know who you are
and what you’ve published. Get keyed up about Creative Commons so that you know
how, and where, to publish open access. If you don’t ask for funding, you won’t
get it (publishing OA with Palgrave currently costs £11,000), and you should
discuss your own embargo lengths too. Don’t leave it all to the publisher or
institution to promote yourself, and get online to track the impact of your
work. Open access may put more emphasis on collaboration, but it also
highlights the need for self-determination. Your work isn’t finished just
because it’s published.
The practical difficulties of
open access – where do you get the money, how do you make sure it’s sustainable
– may seem unconnected to your concerns. In a traditional publishing landscape,
you’d probably be right. But this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed by
the older generation of academics: this is a problem that we will need to solve. It’ll be our generation implementing this
solution, building on the work done by the likes of OAPEN or Knowledge Unlatched. And it’ll be
us having the conversations with HEFCE towards making sure that our research
can be read by the majority, and can be read for a long time to come. This
isn’t a conversation to eavesdrop on; this is one to enter into.
We’re doing our PhDs at a small
university. There are a ton of advantages – and there are a ton of ways to
eliminate at least some of the disadvantages. Our library cannot buy all of the
research platforms that we each need to perform on a world-class platform. The
debate at this conference was, in some ways, getting ahead of itself: it asked
how we can make our research available to the public when it’s not yet equally
available to academics. We’re running before we’ve fully worked out how to
walk. But this is the kind of debate that somewhere like Keele needs to make
its voice heard, because it’s somewhere like Keele that is going to get the
most out of open access publishing. If we don’t have the resources to buy our
way onto a world-class research stage, then we need to go by a different route.
Open access will bring our work more into the wider public community, yes – but
it will also help us to engage with the world-class research community that we
deserve to be a part of.
Useful Links:
Here’s just a few of the resources mentioned at the
conference. For a more in depth idea of the content and context of the event,
check out the Twitter feed at #oabooks
or the Storify
of that feed for easier reading.
