November 16, 2018 • 38 mins
Panel Discussion to debate the proposed changes to the policy on Open Access for monographs in the next REF after REF 2021 which will have profound implications for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Panellists: Richard Ovenden, Bodley's Librarian, Professor Julia Smith, Chichele Professor of Medieval History, Research Director, Faculty of History, Helen Snaith, Senior Policy Advisor, Research England, David Clark, Head of Academic Division, OUP
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(00:00):
Okay. Well, hello, hello and welcome. I think we are expecting a few late comers, but I don't want to stop us getting going right now.
And thank you very much for everyone who has come along on what I know is an exceptionally busy day and time of year.
And thank you especially to people who've come from far afield, from outwith Oxford.
(00:25):
And also my thanks to the Bodleian for hosting us here this afternoon.
I'm Judith Smith from the History Faculty, and I'm co-hosting this forum with Richard Avedon, the head of the Oxford Libraries Network.
Wallace O'Brien. And with me here are Helen Snaith, who, as you can see, is a senior policy analyst with Ukri and David Clarke from UPI.
(00:53):
What we're going to do is each of the four of us is going to make a short presentation which is
being recorded and will subsequently be available as a podcast for colleagues who aren't here.
But then the recording apparatus will be switched off after the presentations,
(01:13):
and there will be an open forum for question and answer and comment from the floor and questions and can
either come to the panel or they can be picked up by other people who are in the audience and so forth.
So without more ado, let me get going and give you a brief indication of what we think we might be talking about and why.
(01:37):
I'm sitting here and I'm sitting here because I'm the director of research for the History Faculty,
which is the largest humanities faculty here in Oxford.
And by faculty in this sense, I mean what most other universities call a department,
in other words, an institutional clustering of disciplinary specialists.
(01:58):
We are probably, although I haven't checked it out, the largest humanities department in the UK.
And if we're not absolutely the largest, then we must certainly be up there in the top couple.
History was one of the four subjects which in the RFP for 2014,
(02:19):
the last research assessment returned more than 50% of its outputs in the form of books and book chapters,
and were a discipline in which the monograph, as we all know and love it,
is indeed the gold standard for scholarship and also for career progression and so on.
(02:43):
Workshop on the future of the monograph is something which is of vital significance to my colleagues in the history faculty.
But I'm not really here just as a historian. I'm sitting here because I think that because of our sheer size and diversity of interests,
which range literally globally and literally from the fourth to the 21st century,
(03:05):
the Oxford History faculty, in some sense does stand for the entire British monograph writing and reading academic community.
So what we want to do today is two things in plan Richard and I in planning this forum.
The first is to begin the process of updating colleagues in history and the social sciences about
(03:27):
some of the significant develops in the developments in the scholarly publishing landscape,
which are of particular concern to those in the history and the social sciences.
But secondly, and equally importantly, to provide an opportunity for everyone here to ask questions,
exchange views and information with people from a wide range of different interests in academic book publishing.
(03:56):
And I should say that we're very lucky that we've got a very wide range of stakeholders present with us today,
people who are involved in all stages in the production and use of monographs as well as in the making,
in the processes of making them available to both current and future generations of readers.
We've got academic colleagues here at all levels, from early career researchers through to very senior colleagues and of course, colleagues.
(04:24):
We both produce and we consume books. We've got publishers present both from the commercial and the academic sectors of the publishing world.
We've got representatives of learned societies. We've got librarians, both subject librarians and system specialists.
We've got research administrators, we've got policy makers and trendsetters.
(04:47):
So this is really a forum with many different positions involved in the future of the monograph.
Now, by brief way of background, all university colleagues, I'm quite sure, are aware that for the upcoming Ref. Ref 2021,
we are required to submit all our journal articles and conference papers in open access format,
(05:10):
and we're not going to be discussing journals here today,
despite the fact that five weeks ago there was a very major European policy announcement
known by shorthand as plans calling for the realisation of full and immediate open access.
It does have massive implications for journal publishing,
(05:30):
but Richard and I don't want to be diverted for reasons which I will come onto in a moment from the goal
which we had when we first developed this plan back in the early summer to keep our focus on books.
Now, the second part of the background is that in December 2016, there was a quiet announcement from Heskey or Heskey, as was, and I'm quoting.
(05:54):
So they intend to move towards an open access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next ref.
And in that context, the next draft was this upcoming 2021 one.
So they're referring to the ref after that, which is predicted to be around 2027, 2028.
(06:16):
So an intention to move towards open access requirement for monographs is what we want to focus on here this afternoon.
And in the words of one of my colleagues who is one of the most high profile,
best selling and best known Oxford academics, we face an existential Brexit like moment.
(06:38):
That's a quote from an email which I received earlier today.
Since 2016, there have been lively discussions among various stakeholders, of which I must hasten to say that I am not party to those discussions.
I'm a complete outsider to them. And there have also been an intensification of the ongoing experiments with open access book publishing.
(07:03):
But as I understand, they remain fairly small scale and open access.
Book publishing, as distinct from journal publishing, is still in.
Pretty much its infancy. So in focusing on open access,
monographs today were focusing on very significantly different issues from those which have faced the journal world over the last few years.
(07:28):
And I'd like to pull out just a few of them as I see it from my perspective.
On the first one, of course, is the length of time that it takes to write a book.
It's not uncommon that it takes 8 to 10 years. In other words, it may very easily cross more than one ref cycle.
Another one is the moment.
(07:49):
The point at which a legally binding publishing contract is signed can often be at the start rather than at the conclusion of that writing process.
And I'm sure that there are colleagues around the university who have contracts,
legal contracts in their drawers which have been there, possibly gathering dust for really quite considerable periods of time.
(08:14):
And I hasten to say that I'm guilty. The economics of Monographic publishing are very different from that of journals.
There are questions about where the burden of financing the production lies,
and there are also questions of authors income generating potential in the form of royalties.
(08:35):
The editorial role of the publishers and the presses is significantly different for books than it is from journals.
There is a big question around copyrighted third party material in the form of images,
text quotations and the like, and the significance which they can play in humanities books.
(08:57):
And then there are big questions around the infrastructure issues,
both the software and the storage solutions which monographic open access publishing suggests.
So my own personal stimulus for agreeing to co-chair this forum with Richard is firstly,
of course, as an individual scholar and author who both reads and writes books.
(09:21):
But secondly, and much more importantly, as director of research for the History Faculty,
I find myself asking the tactical question and it's this What advice should I give colleagues as they
complete their publications for 2021 and lay the groundwork for their submission for the next ref?
(09:42):
What should I be saying to them? And you're all here to help me begin to figure out some answers on equally what sort of book publishing
contracts would they be advised to sign or not to sign as they face forward into the next eight,
ten, 12 years worth of their research? And alongside that, I have another set of issues which I might say are not so much tactical as moral,
(10:11):
and they stem from my very, very great concern for the future well-being of our young colleagues.
And here in Oxford, we've got a very large community of exceptionally talented early career researchers and doctoral students who know that a
monograph with a prestigious press is the gold standard for positioning themselves as advantageously as possible in a job market,
(10:37):
which can be described at best as cutthroat.
What should we be saying to them, and how should we be helping the next generation of scholars form their careers in a
way which is for the health of their disciplines and for the sake of their own career.
(10:58):
So our aim right now is to raise some awareness of these issues and to stimulate a wider flow of questions, comments and information as possible.
And on that note, I'm going to end each of my three colleagues are going to speak for no more than 5 minutes each,
after which we will switch the microphones off and pass over for questions and comments from the floor.
(11:25):
So I'm now going to turn to Helen Snaith, who is at the thick of the policy setting in UK.
Try to give us her take on some of these issues.
Helen, thank you. I think I'm here today. We've speaking with two hats on one as a senior policy adviser at Research England,
and the second as the Secretariat for the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group.
(11:52):
And I'll speak briefly about the work that the UK group is doing and how this work then is
going to inform part of Research England's approach to developing a draft policy next year.
And so we've already stated that in December 2016 the four funding bodies signalled their intention to move towards a requirement for open.
(12:15):
SAS monographs in the RAF, often X expected to take place roughly around 2027.
This was then restated at the Regents conference in February 2018,
and I think that that restatement has actually act as a quite a bit of a catalyst for some of the discussions,
and it's really led to these discussions that we're having today.
(12:38):
There are, of course, huge benefits in extending open access to the monographs to include books, but there are substantial complexities in doing so.
Importantly, and as noted by Jeffrey Cross-sex, report on open access to HeForShe, which reported in 2015,
monographs are vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication in many disciplines,
(13:02):
particularly the arts and humanities, and they must be sustained in any move towards open access.
So complementary to the announcement made by the four funding bodies,
then the universities UK Open Access Monograph Group was also was also established in late 2016 and is currently chaired by Professor Roger Kane.
(13:22):
The working group is governed by and is accountable to the University UK Open Access Coordination Group,
chaired by Professor Adam to counter the remit of the Working Group is to monitor,
monitor and evaluate progress towards open access monographs, to foster a dialogue with the sector and to encourage innovative new business models.
(13:44):
The working group has developed three strands of work so far.
The first is a synthesis report that provides an overview of the open access
monograph landscape where the significant activities and developments in this area.
This is the report was published in July 2018.
A further two strands of work focus on data analysis, animal engagement, and fostering a dialogue with the sector.
(14:11):
On the data analysis front, full stop have been tasked with collecting and analysing data on open access monograph publishing,
says the consultancy firm. Full stop. They're expected to report to the university's UK group by the end of the calendar year.
I think it's important to note as well this is not an advisory function.
(14:33):
Rather, they've been tasked with a very specific set of questions put forward by the project steering group.
These questions have been further refined through interviews and surveys with stakeholders.
The Monographs Working Group have also hosted two engagement events.
The first was organised with the Arts and Humanities Alliance and aimed at fostering a dialogue with learned societies and subject associations.
(14:59):
The second was led by the Publishers Association and took place just last week and again aimed at addressing
some of the challenges on open access monographs and some possible solutions to these challenges.
The data analysis from full stop, coupled with the reports from two events, will be published as a package of work in early 2019.
(15:23):
And what we're quite keen to do is to collate the discussions from these two events
and that will be put forward as as this evidence and this body of evidence.
This work then will feed into research England's deliberations on open access monographs during the course of next year.
So in terms of timings,
(15:44):
we expect to come up with a draft policy approach next year and with a view to seeking views and consulting with the wider sector in 2019.
We'd have a view then to reach some firm, direct, firm decisions around the direction of policy and towards the end of next year.
(16:04):
And this would fit in then with the preliminary reporting from the UK,
our open access review, which will also be reporting in the second half of 2019.
And I think it's probably worth stating as well that as we develop this policy there will of course be exceptions.
(16:25):
And we were working with the sector through the Universities UK group, through with researchers,
publishers and other stakeholders in order to identify what these exceptions might be.
I think we want to avoid the trap of if there are being exemptions.
We don't want those to act as disincentives for making a monograph open access, which is such as some of the challenges that we need to work through.
(16:49):
But in the context of today's discussion, it would be useful, I think, to consider some common principles in any move towards open access,
and one would be to maximise the dissemination of scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences,
which also want to maintain quality assurance through rigorous peer review.
(17:15):
Which also wants to ensure that the processes of dissemination are financially sustainable.
For universities, publishers and for funders.
I think there are some real opportunities with open access and monographs.
Take for example, unlike journals, there is the ability for the print version to coexist alongside the online version.
(17:37):
We are in a very different model to journals and should be treated as such.
And let's just work this to our advantage. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Helen, but then pass it over to David.
He's the head of the academic division at AUP. Thank you very much.
I thought I'd maybe begin with a personal reflection.
(17:59):
So I began my career publishing monographs in economics, and one of the friends would have seen the last 30 years.
And I'm a generation where the Internet era has been the gradual reduction in the numbers of sales of individual monographs.
(18:19):
Now that comes with two consequences.
One, it challenges the economic viability of the monograph, and it also speaks to the dissemination of the monograph.
And that is particularly relevant because one of the goals here is clearly to disseminate work and have it won't be read and widely consumed.
(18:42):
So we have been through what at various points has been referred to as the crisis of the monograph.
Meanwhile, the monograph continues and university professors do psychotherapy,
spend a great deal of time and effort producing monographs of quality and distinction,
and in turning down and selecting monographs which they don't feel meet that criteria.
(19:04):
Opie is in a unique position because we have a group of delegates who influence and
shape our publishing policy in a way that many of the commercial presses don't.
At the same time, we have seen some commercial presses under pressure.
I suspect largely economically driven, have ended up publishing either many more monographs or not at all,
(19:24):
and the world has shifted quite markedly in that direction.
So we've seen a lot of change. I think what's helpful is to keep in mind the usefulness of the monograph as a form.
It remains obviously relevant in the arts and humanities.
One of the sad things I think many of us have noted is in some fields we've seen a shift from the monograph to sequential journal article publishing,
(19:50):
and there was a risk in any change in the model that the monograph as a concept is undermined by.
Pressurised academics keen to secure that first job,
for whom the attraction of publishing free general schools rather than a monograph sways
(20:11):
them towards the job may only be a good thing or bad thing depending upon the discipline.
But we've certainly seen areas like economics, which has struggled to publish as many of the longer form work which we used to see.
And I also think that's a shame and I'm not really sure that I'm right sometimes
that we see economic models driving publishing behaviour in a way it should.
(20:36):
The challenge has always been about when we talk about the monograph, we must travel a little because the definition of what we mean.
So I thought just to illustrate our points, I would bring along a couple of examples.
So we have an example of a recently published law monograph, which E.P. published, I think two weeks ago.
(21:02):
And this is essentially a Ph.D. which is being extensively developed.
It's gone through a rigorous editorial process. It's part of a series which has distinguished editors, and it meets a certain criteria.
And we know these sorts of books, so in the low hundreds in numbers.
But they were also increasingly widely used electronically.
(21:24):
And that is what a modern monograph looks like.
I thought I would show I would perhaps unfairly contrast this with one of our bestselling and topical U.S. books,
which is a book by Kathleen Jamieson on Cyberwar, which is interesting because this would effectively be a trade book.
(21:45):
She's been very busy on talk shows in the US, but what's interesting is if you look at the content and the format,
what's actually in that monograph, in that book, it looks a lot like a monograph.
And the level of complexity and difficulty certainly is that of a monograph and a level of scholarship and rigour.
And so we find ourselves in this somewhat definitional problem about where we
(22:08):
have a book which may be very well selling and goes in to a worth exercise.
Where does it fit within that? One of the challenges for monograph publishing is to do it well.
It's unlikely to be a profitable activity.
We hope to be profitable, but it's by no means where the larger commercial houses have focussed large amounts of effort.
(22:32):
But there tends to do it because of volume, as I mentioned earlier. So that creates a challenge.
What I think is very encouraging in the broader spectrum of the monograph is that whether
we think about open access or whether we think about more conventional business models,
it is more possible to achieve wide dissemination.
(22:54):
We're still somewhat in our early days, in fact, and I think although we didn't want to get dragged into the journal comparisons,
the interesting thing is that 20 years of journal electronic publishing has created an infrastructure for dissemination and discovery,
and we have not quite seen that to the same level with the monograph or with the book.
(23:18):
But it's a helpful route forwards because it shows us how we can actually ensure that we achieve readership and the dissemination we will want.
And I should say, Domenico, to whatever the future outcome is. I would note that a lot of the conversations around the monograph,
what some would echo the conversations that happened before digital dissemination of journals.
(23:40):
People often believe journals will not be widely read through efforts to try and determine whether they were useful.
Digital simulation has, I think, both created new use and illustrative use and made it more meaningful.
So that can serve as very helpful. What? So I feel a level of optimism about the monograph in whatever form the challenge is.
(24:03):
When we look at the journals space, I mean, it has as an analogy, we don't see too much.
But the challenge is we have created a lot of complexity in the open access area and
it's also created potential the unaffordability of publishing for some authors.
And that remains a real area of anxiety and concern, especially as we move towards the arts and humanities.
(24:27):
It's one thing for particle physicists to pay for open access publishing of whatever format they want to,
because for them, frankly, it's a rounding error on their experimental experimentation costs.
It's a very different thing for historians. I know for gratitude the reference to contract long session draws because I suspect we we probably would
(24:52):
share the concern about how many contracts we have which have been sitting in drawers for some decades.
And we still wait with a mixture of anticipation and fear to see how many of them turn up each year.
At the the point I think we would have to we deeply do publish open access monographs and we've had some success with that.
(25:13):
But still, the take off remains very low. And that is mainly, I think, economic.
The cost is for most people a discouragement.
The biggest challenge I think the sector needs to look at is not one necessarily is affected by o p is constrained and will be published
hopefully by the Board of Delegates who inject quality control and require us to publish at a certain level the challenge we have.
(25:43):
I think if you look at the wider sector is if you move to a model which looks like a low margin, repetitive activity.
Then that activity will become a race to the bottom in terms of quality, in terms of selectivity.
And if the author pays, ultimately, the risk will, and I hope may not be the only way you could articulate this at all.
(26:06):
The pace the risk is what you end up with is a machine learning process,
which is driven by funding being the only way for a publishing company to achieve a margin.
And since much of the monograph publishing is within the commercial sector, not just the university sector, that's a risk and a potential risk,
which I suspect most commercial publishers have no interest in pursuing, but fear they may be driven in that direction.
(26:31):
So I think I'm within my 5 minutes. Thank you very much indeed, Richard.
Finally over to you. So thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm going to I think some of the things which the early speakers have said live very neatly into some of the things that I'm going to say,
almost as it were, at the kind of tail end of the the lifecycle of such objects as monographs.
(26:58):
But I'm going to start by saying that as a librarian and having been in senior management now for 20 years and witnessed the open access,
dare I call it revolution from that perspective?
In two institutions, Edinburgh and Oxford, librarians have very much been at the forefront of that movement,
(27:20):
and generally in our DNA is widening access to the information.
And I think that's very much been at the forefront of the minds of librarians who've been active in the open access movement.
I count myself as being within that community and have certainly witnessed the benefits that that
(27:46):
has brought to certain aspects of the scholarly communication lifecycle over that period of time.
I'm also somebody who actually now, a very long time ago has published two monographs.
So I have witnessed personally the the role that editors and publishers have
played for myself in improving the communication of my own intellectual output.
(28:12):
And so I am somebody who have really kind of believes in the academic publishing business.
I'd like to give a few little examples from the lie from the boffins perspective.
Having administered the as we administer part of the open access compliance agenda here in the university,
(28:36):
again with our colleagues from research services and I acknowledge my excellent colleague lot of being from research services.
We work very much in partnership on this, but since April 2016,
we have managed on behalf of the academic community in Oxford over 22,000 deposits into our open access institutional repository called ORA.
(29:04):
And we are currently operating at about a thousand compliant articles a month which are being processed by my colleagues in the Bodleian.
And on top of the rest compliant, there's probably about another 3000 a month which are being processed.
So if you like our academic colleagues backlist, so the scale has been enormous and growing alongside that scale has been incredible complexity.
(29:33):
That's one of the things that David said that the policy agenda has brought
into play is extraordinary complexity and a very fast moving policy agenda.
It's been a bit like nailing jelly to a wall,
and we've put up matrices of different policy arrangements from research funders, publishers, journals, institutions.
(29:58):
And actually navigating that landscape has been incredibly complex and difficult and frustrating, and there's been a cost overhead to that.
And I think that has to be added to the economics of any new open access monograph model is the the overhead of compliance.
(30:18):
One aspect of funding open access has of course been the gold route.
Article processing charges. And to give you a scale of that here, an idea of the scale of here in Oxford,
our budget for open app sees this current academic year and this is the Research Council's academic year.
(30:40):
So it's April to April as it were is to sorry is ÂŁ1.6 million from RC UK and ÂŁ1.2 million from the Wellcome Trust and the charity's Open Access Fund.
So that's an additional expenditure which is currently being provided to us from the public purse to allow gold open access publishing.
(31:03):
We are currently operating at an average APS APC spend of about ÂŁ2,000 per article for RC, UK and 2300 for Wellcome Trust funded articles.
So there's an enormous extra cost which is currently being funded by the research councils.
(31:27):
That's currently guaranteed, as it were, until March 2020.
What happens after that and what will happen? Where will the money to fund book processing charges come from?
How can it be fitted into an increasingly tight academic funding system?
(31:53):
Talking of which it might be worth just quoting you a few figures from Oxford's overall research portfolio,
because there is some been some suggestion,
particularly because the research granting opportunities in the humanities and social sciences are so much lower than
they are for the other disciplines that QR could play and should play a role in funding book processing charges.
(32:19):
So Oxford's overall researching come from multiple research sources in the last academic year,
and I confess I forgot to write down whether this is 2016, 17 or 1718.
I think it's 26. 17 was a just a tad over ÂŁ500 million.
142 million of that came from QR and from the ref driven QR.
(32:46):
That was ÂŁ80 million and that spread across all the academic disciplines and not in equal proportion, it should be said.
So if that is to be a source of funding, BPC is indeed and possibly even APIs.
There isn't a lot of wiggle room in that budget, if, if any.
(33:12):
So the other thing I'd like to say just about the overhead of compliance is that the libraries and research services,
together with academic administrators,
have taken on a swallowed a lot of these costs themselves have managed their priorities differently from the past to take on this role.
(33:35):
And there has been a huge agenda of advocacy and information provided to the academic
community to engage them with the realities of the rigours of the new policy environment.
And we can expect further more of this to come if it's extended to monographs.
(33:57):
And it has taken quite some time for the articles world to wake up, even in disciplines which are more used to this mode of publishing.
To to take this on board. So I think the time, the lead in times, as Julia was saying, not only about the time it takes to actually write a monograph,
but the time it will take for the academic community to adjust their way of working to fit.
(34:24):
Any new model needs to be generous, I would say.
There were some other kind of more librarian things. I would like to say, if you will forgive me, ladies and gentlemen.
One is about discoverability. One of the benefits of working with the commercial book trade is that they are good at making their books discoverable.
(34:47):
And I think that that needs to be borne in mind that those workflows, those commercial publishing workflows fit very neatly.
We have honed discoverability and library workflows very closely together with publishing workflows over many decades,
and we've got them to work pretty well. One of the things that I've noticed from the leave deposits side of things is
(35:12):
that when we switch to allow electronic publishing through the 2013 legislation,
is that the speed at which those workflows have had to change and continue to evolve is being has been actually quite remarkable.
One of the things I thought I would also mention is preservation.
(35:35):
So one of the roles that libraries play on behalf of the academic community is to preserve
knowledge and to make it accessible for future generations of scholars to access.
We do that in the print world through what we euphemistically termed regimes of benign neglect.
And so they have been really quite neglectful in some institutions over the centuries.
(36:01):
I'm proud to say in this institution, they are much less neglectful,
particularly since we built the Swindon Book Depository, where they are in, I say, standard preservation and environment.
But the discoverability, the preservation of digital content is a growing issue in our community.
(36:22):
And I speak as the president of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
And particularly as electronic publication of monographic form allows so much more richness of content,
particularly audio visual content, to be added to the public publishing environment.
How do we actually preserve that? How do we keep all that together? How do we make insightful in the future?
(36:46):
And the costs of that have to be borne somewhere.
And we're still doing research and development on that. You know, we've we've come a long way, particularly in the last decade or decade and a half.
But there's still a long way to go to figure out how we do that and certainly
how we can ensure the accessibility to that rich content into the future.
(37:13):
There's just one other thing that I thought I would say before I finish,
and that's because I was expecting to hear it said by the earlier participants.
And that's the words academic freedom. So if we're if the model is going to shift to one where the academic community, if you like,
has more control through the allocation of funding as to who gets access to book
(37:36):
processing charges and can then take them to a publisher to seek them to be published.
Who controls that decision making process? How is that to be managed?
And how does that fit within a long standing,
much treasured and highly important culture of academic freedom that we are privileged to enjoy and protect in this country and in this university?
(38:11):
Thank you and thank you to all my fellow panellists.
We have thrown into the air a huge number of issues of very,
very great complexity and in one way or another, all of them are of concern to people here in this room.
(38:32):
Otherwise you would not be here.
We are at the point where could I request our technical help to switch off the sound system, please, so that we not the sound system.
Not as our system. The recording. Yes. So that we ceased to record.
Okay. Well, hello, hello and welcome. I think we are expecting a few late comers, but I don't want to stop us getting going right now.
And thank you very much for everyone who has come along on what I know is an exceptionally busy day and time of year.
And thank you especially to people who've come from far afield, from outwith Oxford.
(00:25):
And also my thanks to the Bodleian for hosting us here this afternoon.
I'm Judith Smith from the History Faculty, and I'm co-hosting this forum with Richard Avedon, the head of the Oxford Libraries Network.
Wallace O'Brien. And with me here are Helen Snaith, who, as you can see, is a senior policy analyst with Ukri and David Clarke from UPI.
(00:53):
What we're going to do is each of the four of us is going to make a short presentation which is
being recorded and will subsequently be available as a podcast for colleagues who aren't here.
But then the recording apparatus will be switched off after the presentations,
(01:13):
and there will be an open forum for question and answer and comment from the floor and questions and can
either come to the panel or they can be picked up by other people who are in the audience and so forth.
So without more ado, let me get going and give you a brief indication of what we think we might be talking about and why.
(01:37):
I'm sitting here and I'm sitting here because I'm the director of research for the History Faculty,
which is the largest humanities faculty here in Oxford.
And by faculty in this sense, I mean what most other universities call a department,
in other words, an institutional clustering of disciplinary specialists.
(01:58):
We are probably, although I haven't checked it out, the largest humanities department in the UK.
And if we're not absolutely the largest, then we must certainly be up there in the top couple.
History was one of the four subjects which in the RFP for 2014,
(02:19):
the last research assessment returned more than 50% of its outputs in the form of books and book chapters,
and were a discipline in which the monograph, as we all know and love it,
is indeed the gold standard for scholarship and also for career progression and so on.
(02:43):
Workshop on the future of the monograph is something which is of vital significance to my colleagues in the history faculty.
But I'm not really here just as a historian. I'm sitting here because I think that because of our sheer size and diversity of interests,
which range literally globally and literally from the fourth to the 21st century,
(03:05):
the Oxford History faculty, in some sense does stand for the entire British monograph writing and reading academic community.
So what we want to do today is two things in plan Richard and I in planning this forum.
The first is to begin the process of updating colleagues in history and the social sciences about
(03:27):
some of the significant develops in the developments in the scholarly publishing landscape,
which are of particular concern to those in the history and the social sciences.
But secondly, and equally importantly, to provide an opportunity for everyone here to ask questions,
exchange views and information with people from a wide range of different interests in academic book publishing.
(03:56):
And I should say that we're very lucky that we've got a very wide range of stakeholders present with us today,
people who are involved in all stages in the production and use of monographs as well as in the making,
in the processes of making them available to both current and future generations of readers.
We've got academic colleagues here at all levels, from early career researchers through to very senior colleagues and of course, colleagues.
(04:24):
We both produce and we consume books. We've got publishers present both from the commercial and the academic sectors of the publishing world.
We've got representatives of learned societies. We've got librarians, both subject librarians and system specialists.
We've got research administrators, we've got policy makers and trendsetters.
(04:47):
So this is really a forum with many different positions involved in the future of the monograph.
Now, by brief way of background, all university colleagues, I'm quite sure, are aware that for the upcoming Ref. Ref 2021,
we are required to submit all our journal articles and conference papers in open access format,
(05:10):
and we're not going to be discussing journals here today,
despite the fact that five weeks ago there was a very major European policy announcement
known by shorthand as plans calling for the realisation of full and immediate open access.
It does have massive implications for journal publishing,
(05:30):
but Richard and I don't want to be diverted for reasons which I will come onto in a moment from the goal
which we had when we first developed this plan back in the early summer to keep our focus on books.
Now, the second part of the background is that in December 2016, there was a quiet announcement from Heskey or Heskey, as was, and I'm quoting.
(05:54):
So they intend to move towards an open access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next ref.
And in that context, the next draft was this upcoming 2021 one.
So they're referring to the ref after that, which is predicted to be around 2027, 2028.
(06:16):
So an intention to move towards open access requirement for monographs is what we want to focus on here this afternoon.
And in the words of one of my colleagues who is one of the most high profile,
best selling and best known Oxford academics, we face an existential Brexit like moment.
(06:38):
That's a quote from an email which I received earlier today.
Since 2016, there have been lively discussions among various stakeholders, of which I must hasten to say that I am not party to those discussions.
I'm a complete outsider to them. And there have also been an intensification of the ongoing experiments with open access book publishing.
(07:03):
But as I understand, they remain fairly small scale and open access.
Book publishing, as distinct from journal publishing, is still in.
Pretty much its infancy. So in focusing on open access,
monographs today were focusing on very significantly different issues from those which have faced the journal world over the last few years.
(07:28):
And I'd like to pull out just a few of them as I see it from my perspective.
On the first one, of course, is the length of time that it takes to write a book.
It's not uncommon that it takes 8 to 10 years. In other words, it may very easily cross more than one ref cycle.
Another one is the moment.
(07:49):
The point at which a legally binding publishing contract is signed can often be at the start rather than at the conclusion of that writing process.
And I'm sure that there are colleagues around the university who have contracts,
legal contracts in their drawers which have been there, possibly gathering dust for really quite considerable periods of time.
(08:14):
And I hasten to say that I'm guilty. The economics of Monographic publishing are very different from that of journals.
There are questions about where the burden of financing the production lies,
and there are also questions of authors income generating potential in the form of royalties.
(08:35):
The editorial role of the publishers and the presses is significantly different for books than it is from journals.
There is a big question around copyrighted third party material in the form of images,
text quotations and the like, and the significance which they can play in humanities books.
(08:57):
And then there are big questions around the infrastructure issues,
both the software and the storage solutions which monographic open access publishing suggests.
So my own personal stimulus for agreeing to co-chair this forum with Richard is firstly,
of course, as an individual scholar and author who both reads and writes books.
(09:21):
But secondly, and much more importantly, as director of research for the History Faculty,
I find myself asking the tactical question and it's this What advice should I give colleagues as they
complete their publications for 2021 and lay the groundwork for their submission for the next ref?
(09:42):
What should I be saying to them? And you're all here to help me begin to figure out some answers on equally what sort of book publishing
contracts would they be advised to sign or not to sign as they face forward into the next eight,
ten, 12 years worth of their research? And alongside that, I have another set of issues which I might say are not so much tactical as moral,
(10:11):
and they stem from my very, very great concern for the future well-being of our young colleagues.
And here in Oxford, we've got a very large community of exceptionally talented early career researchers and doctoral students who know that a
monograph with a prestigious press is the gold standard for positioning themselves as advantageously as possible in a job market,
(10:37):
which can be described at best as cutthroat.
What should we be saying to them, and how should we be helping the next generation of scholars form their careers in a
way which is for the health of their disciplines and for the sake of their own career.
(10:58):
So our aim right now is to raise some awareness of these issues and to stimulate a wider flow of questions, comments and information as possible.
And on that note, I'm going to end each of my three colleagues are going to speak for no more than 5 minutes each,
after which we will switch the microphones off and pass over for questions and comments from the floor.
(11:25):
So I'm now going to turn to Helen Snaith, who is at the thick of the policy setting in UK.
Try to give us her take on some of these issues.
Helen, thank you. I think I'm here today. We've speaking with two hats on one as a senior policy adviser at Research England,
and the second as the Secretariat for the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group.
(11:52):
And I'll speak briefly about the work that the UK group is doing and how this work then is
going to inform part of Research England's approach to developing a draft policy next year.
And so we've already stated that in December 2016 the four funding bodies signalled their intention to move towards a requirement for open.
(12:15):
SAS monographs in the RAF, often X expected to take place roughly around 2027.
This was then restated at the Regents conference in February 2018,
and I think that that restatement has actually act as a quite a bit of a catalyst for some of the discussions,
and it's really led to these discussions that we're having today.
(12:38):
There are, of course, huge benefits in extending open access to the monographs to include books, but there are substantial complexities in doing so.
Importantly, and as noted by Jeffrey Cross-sex, report on open access to HeForShe, which reported in 2015,
monographs are vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication in many disciplines,
(13:02):
particularly the arts and humanities, and they must be sustained in any move towards open access.
So complementary to the announcement made by the four funding bodies,
then the universities UK Open Access Monograph Group was also was also established in late 2016 and is currently chaired by Professor Roger Kane.
(13:22):
The working group is governed by and is accountable to the University UK Open Access Coordination Group,
chaired by Professor Adam to counter the remit of the Working Group is to monitor,
monitor and evaluate progress towards open access monographs, to foster a dialogue with the sector and to encourage innovative new business models.
(13:44):
The working group has developed three strands of work so far.
The first is a synthesis report that provides an overview of the open access
monograph landscape where the significant activities and developments in this area.
This is the report was published in July 2018.
A further two strands of work focus on data analysis, animal engagement, and fostering a dialogue with the sector.
(14:11):
On the data analysis front, full stop have been tasked with collecting and analysing data on open access monograph publishing,
says the consultancy firm. Full stop. They're expected to report to the university's UK group by the end of the calendar year.
I think it's important to note as well this is not an advisory function.
(14:33):
Rather, they've been tasked with a very specific set of questions put forward by the project steering group.
These questions have been further refined through interviews and surveys with stakeholders.
The Monographs Working Group have also hosted two engagement events.
The first was organised with the Arts and Humanities Alliance and aimed at fostering a dialogue with learned societies and subject associations.
(14:59):
The second was led by the Publishers Association and took place just last week and again aimed at addressing
some of the challenges on open access monographs and some possible solutions to these challenges.
The data analysis from full stop, coupled with the reports from two events, will be published as a package of work in early 2019.
(15:23):
And what we're quite keen to do is to collate the discussions from these two events
and that will be put forward as as this evidence and this body of evidence.
This work then will feed into research England's deliberations on open access monographs during the course of next year.
So in terms of timings,
(15:44):
we expect to come up with a draft policy approach next year and with a view to seeking views and consulting with the wider sector in 2019.
We'd have a view then to reach some firm, direct, firm decisions around the direction of policy and towards the end of next year.
(16:04):
And this would fit in then with the preliminary reporting from the UK,
our open access review, which will also be reporting in the second half of 2019.
And I think it's probably worth stating as well that as we develop this policy there will of course be exceptions.
(16:25):
And we were working with the sector through the Universities UK group, through with researchers,
publishers and other stakeholders in order to identify what these exceptions might be.
I think we want to avoid the trap of if there are being exemptions.
We don't want those to act as disincentives for making a monograph open access, which is such as some of the challenges that we need to work through.
(16:49):
But in the context of today's discussion, it would be useful, I think, to consider some common principles in any move towards open access,
and one would be to maximise the dissemination of scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences,
which also want to maintain quality assurance through rigorous peer review.
(17:15):
Which also wants to ensure that the processes of dissemination are financially sustainable.
For universities, publishers and for funders.
I think there are some real opportunities with open access and monographs.
Take for example, unlike journals, there is the ability for the print version to coexist alongside the online version.
(17:37):
We are in a very different model to journals and should be treated as such.
And let's just work this to our advantage. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Helen, but then pass it over to David.
He's the head of the academic division at AUP. Thank you very much.
I thought I'd maybe begin with a personal reflection.
(17:59):
So I began my career publishing monographs in economics, and one of the friends would have seen the last 30 years.
And I'm a generation where the Internet era has been the gradual reduction in the numbers of sales of individual monographs.
(18:19):
Now that comes with two consequences.
One, it challenges the economic viability of the monograph, and it also speaks to the dissemination of the monograph.
And that is particularly relevant because one of the goals here is clearly to disseminate work and have it won't be read and widely consumed.
(18:42):
So we have been through what at various points has been referred to as the crisis of the monograph.
Meanwhile, the monograph continues and university professors do psychotherapy,
spend a great deal of time and effort producing monographs of quality and distinction,
and in turning down and selecting monographs which they don't feel meet that criteria.
(19:04):
Opie is in a unique position because we have a group of delegates who influence and
shape our publishing policy in a way that many of the commercial presses don't.
At the same time, we have seen some commercial presses under pressure.
I suspect largely economically driven, have ended up publishing either many more monographs or not at all,
(19:24):
and the world has shifted quite markedly in that direction.
So we've seen a lot of change. I think what's helpful is to keep in mind the usefulness of the monograph as a form.
It remains obviously relevant in the arts and humanities.
One of the sad things I think many of us have noted is in some fields we've seen a shift from the monograph to sequential journal article publishing,
(19:50):
and there was a risk in any change in the model that the monograph as a concept is undermined by.
Pressurised academics keen to secure that first job,
for whom the attraction of publishing free general schools rather than a monograph sways
(20:11):
them towards the job may only be a good thing or bad thing depending upon the discipline.
But we've certainly seen areas like economics, which has struggled to publish as many of the longer form work which we used to see.
And I also think that's a shame and I'm not really sure that I'm right sometimes
that we see economic models driving publishing behaviour in a way it should.
(20:36):
The challenge has always been about when we talk about the monograph, we must travel a little because the definition of what we mean.
So I thought just to illustrate our points, I would bring along a couple of examples.
So we have an example of a recently published law monograph, which E.P. published, I think two weeks ago.
(21:02):
And this is essentially a Ph.D. which is being extensively developed.
It's gone through a rigorous editorial process. It's part of a series which has distinguished editors, and it meets a certain criteria.
And we know these sorts of books, so in the low hundreds in numbers.
But they were also increasingly widely used electronically.
(21:24):
And that is what a modern monograph looks like.
I thought I would show I would perhaps unfairly contrast this with one of our bestselling and topical U.S. books,
which is a book by Kathleen Jamieson on Cyberwar, which is interesting because this would effectively be a trade book.
(21:45):
She's been very busy on talk shows in the US, but what's interesting is if you look at the content and the format,
what's actually in that monograph, in that book, it looks a lot like a monograph.
And the level of complexity and difficulty certainly is that of a monograph and a level of scholarship and rigour.
And so we find ourselves in this somewhat definitional problem about where we
(22:08):
have a book which may be very well selling and goes in to a worth exercise.
Where does it fit within that? One of the challenges for monograph publishing is to do it well.
It's unlikely to be a profitable activity.
We hope to be profitable, but it's by no means where the larger commercial houses have focussed large amounts of effort.
(22:32):
But there tends to do it because of volume, as I mentioned earlier. So that creates a challenge.
What I think is very encouraging in the broader spectrum of the monograph is that whether
we think about open access or whether we think about more conventional business models,
it is more possible to achieve wide dissemination.
(22:54):
We're still somewhat in our early days, in fact, and I think although we didn't want to get dragged into the journal comparisons,
the interesting thing is that 20 years of journal electronic publishing has created an infrastructure for dissemination and discovery,
and we have not quite seen that to the same level with the monograph or with the book.
(23:18):
But it's a helpful route forwards because it shows us how we can actually ensure that we achieve readership and the dissemination we will want.
And I should say, Domenico, to whatever the future outcome is. I would note that a lot of the conversations around the monograph,
what some would echo the conversations that happened before digital dissemination of journals.
(23:40):
People often believe journals will not be widely read through efforts to try and determine whether they were useful.
Digital simulation has, I think, both created new use and illustrative use and made it more meaningful.
So that can serve as very helpful. What? So I feel a level of optimism about the monograph in whatever form the challenge is.
(24:03):
When we look at the journals space, I mean, it has as an analogy, we don't see too much.
But the challenge is we have created a lot of complexity in the open access area and
it's also created potential the unaffordability of publishing for some authors.
And that remains a real area of anxiety and concern, especially as we move towards the arts and humanities.
(24:27):
It's one thing for particle physicists to pay for open access publishing of whatever format they want to,
because for them, frankly, it's a rounding error on their experimental experimentation costs.
It's a very different thing for historians. I know for gratitude the reference to contract long session draws because I suspect we we probably would
(24:52):
share the concern about how many contracts we have which have been sitting in drawers for some decades.
And we still wait with a mixture of anticipation and fear to see how many of them turn up each year.
At the the point I think we would have to we deeply do publish open access monographs and we've had some success with that.
(25:13):
But still, the take off remains very low. And that is mainly, I think, economic.
The cost is for most people a discouragement.
The biggest challenge I think the sector needs to look at is not one necessarily is affected by o p is constrained and will be published
hopefully by the Board of Delegates who inject quality control and require us to publish at a certain level the challenge we have.
(25:43):
I think if you look at the wider sector is if you move to a model which looks like a low margin, repetitive activity.
Then that activity will become a race to the bottom in terms of quality, in terms of selectivity.
And if the author pays, ultimately, the risk will, and I hope may not be the only way you could articulate this at all.
(26:06):
The pace the risk is what you end up with is a machine learning process,
which is driven by funding being the only way for a publishing company to achieve a margin.
And since much of the monograph publishing is within the commercial sector, not just the university sector, that's a risk and a potential risk,
which I suspect most commercial publishers have no interest in pursuing, but fear they may be driven in that direction.
(26:31):
So I think I'm within my 5 minutes. Thank you very much indeed, Richard.
Finally over to you. So thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm going to I think some of the things which the early speakers have said live very neatly into some of the things that I'm going to say,
almost as it were, at the kind of tail end of the the lifecycle of such objects as monographs.
(26:58):
But I'm going to start by saying that as a librarian and having been in senior management now for 20 years and witnessed the open access,
dare I call it revolution from that perspective?
In two institutions, Edinburgh and Oxford, librarians have very much been at the forefront of that movement,
(27:20):
and generally in our DNA is widening access to the information.
And I think that's very much been at the forefront of the minds of librarians who've been active in the open access movement.
I count myself as being within that community and have certainly witnessed the benefits that that
(27:46):
has brought to certain aspects of the scholarly communication lifecycle over that period of time.
I'm also somebody who actually now, a very long time ago has published two monographs.
So I have witnessed personally the the role that editors and publishers have
played for myself in improving the communication of my own intellectual output.
(28:12):
And so I am somebody who have really kind of believes in the academic publishing business.
I'd like to give a few little examples from the lie from the boffins perspective.
Having administered the as we administer part of the open access compliance agenda here in the university,
(28:36):
again with our colleagues from research services and I acknowledge my excellent colleague lot of being from research services.
We work very much in partnership on this, but since April 2016,
we have managed on behalf of the academic community in Oxford over 22,000 deposits into our open access institutional repository called ORA.
(29:04):
And we are currently operating at about a thousand compliant articles a month which are being processed by my colleagues in the Bodleian.
And on top of the rest compliant, there's probably about another 3000 a month which are being processed.
So if you like our academic colleagues backlist, so the scale has been enormous and growing alongside that scale has been incredible complexity.
(29:33):
That's one of the things that David said that the policy agenda has brought
into play is extraordinary complexity and a very fast moving policy agenda.
It's been a bit like nailing jelly to a wall,
and we've put up matrices of different policy arrangements from research funders, publishers, journals, institutions.
(29:58):
And actually navigating that landscape has been incredibly complex and difficult and frustrating, and there's been a cost overhead to that.
And I think that has to be added to the economics of any new open access monograph model is the the overhead of compliance.
(30:18):
One aspect of funding open access has of course been the gold route.
Article processing charges. And to give you a scale of that here, an idea of the scale of here in Oxford,
our budget for open app sees this current academic year and this is the Research Council's academic year.
(30:40):
So it's April to April as it were is to sorry is ÂŁ1.6 million from RC UK and ÂŁ1.2 million from the Wellcome Trust and the charity's Open Access Fund.
So that's an additional expenditure which is currently being provided to us from the public purse to allow gold open access publishing.
(31:03):
We are currently operating at an average APS APC spend of about ÂŁ2,000 per article for RC, UK and 2300 for Wellcome Trust funded articles.
So there's an enormous extra cost which is currently being funded by the research councils.
(31:27):
That's currently guaranteed, as it were, until March 2020.
What happens after that and what will happen? Where will the money to fund book processing charges come from?
How can it be fitted into an increasingly tight academic funding system?
(31:53):
Talking of which it might be worth just quoting you a few figures from Oxford's overall research portfolio,
because there is some been some suggestion,
particularly because the research granting opportunities in the humanities and social sciences are so much lower than
they are for the other disciplines that QR could play and should play a role in funding book processing charges.
(32:19):
So Oxford's overall researching come from multiple research sources in the last academic year,
and I confess I forgot to write down whether this is 2016, 17 or 1718.
I think it's 26. 17 was a just a tad over ÂŁ500 million.
142 million of that came from QR and from the ref driven QR.
(32:46):
That was ÂŁ80 million and that spread across all the academic disciplines and not in equal proportion, it should be said.
So if that is to be a source of funding, BPC is indeed and possibly even APIs.
There isn't a lot of wiggle room in that budget, if, if any.
(33:12):
So the other thing I'd like to say just about the overhead of compliance is that the libraries and research services,
together with academic administrators,
have taken on a swallowed a lot of these costs themselves have managed their priorities differently from the past to take on this role.
(33:35):
And there has been a huge agenda of advocacy and information provided to the academic
community to engage them with the realities of the rigours of the new policy environment.
And we can expect further more of this to come if it's extended to monographs.
(33:57):
And it has taken quite some time for the articles world to wake up, even in disciplines which are more used to this mode of publishing.
To to take this on board. So I think the time, the lead in times, as Julia was saying, not only about the time it takes to actually write a monograph,
but the time it will take for the academic community to adjust their way of working to fit.
(34:24):
Any new model needs to be generous, I would say.
There were some other kind of more librarian things. I would like to say, if you will forgive me, ladies and gentlemen.
One is about discoverability. One of the benefits of working with the commercial book trade is that they are good at making their books discoverable.
(34:47):
And I think that that needs to be borne in mind that those workflows, those commercial publishing workflows fit very neatly.
We have honed discoverability and library workflows very closely together with publishing workflows over many decades,
and we've got them to work pretty well. One of the things that I've noticed from the leave deposits side of things is
(35:12):
that when we switch to allow electronic publishing through the 2013 legislation,
is that the speed at which those workflows have had to change and continue to evolve is being has been actually quite remarkable.
One of the things I thought I would also mention is preservation.
(35:35):
So one of the roles that libraries play on behalf of the academic community is to preserve
knowledge and to make it accessible for future generations of scholars to access.
We do that in the print world through what we euphemistically termed regimes of benign neglect.
And so they have been really quite neglectful in some institutions over the centuries.
(36:01):
I'm proud to say in this institution, they are much less neglectful,
particularly since we built the Swindon Book Depository, where they are in, I say, standard preservation and environment.
But the discoverability, the preservation of digital content is a growing issue in our community.
(36:22):
And I speak as the president of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
And particularly as electronic publication of monographic form allows so much more richness of content,
particularly audio visual content, to be added to the public publishing environment.
How do we actually preserve that? How do we keep all that together? How do we make insightful in the future?
(36:46):
And the costs of that have to be borne somewhere.
And we're still doing research and development on that. You know, we've we've come a long way, particularly in the last decade or decade and a half.
But there's still a long way to go to figure out how we do that and certainly
how we can ensure the accessibility to that rich content into the future.
(37:13):
There's just one other thing that I thought I would say before I finish,
and that's because I was expecting to hear it said by the earlier participants.
And that's the words academic freedom. So if we're if the model is going to shift to one where the academic community, if you like,
has more control through the allocation of funding as to who gets access to book
(37:36):
processing charges and can then take them to a publisher to seek them to be published.
Who controls that decision making process? How is that to be managed?
And how does that fit within a long standing,
much treasured and highly important culture of academic freedom that we are privileged to enjoy and protect in this country and in this university?
(38:11):
Thank you and thank you to all my fellow panellists.
We have thrown into the air a huge number of issues of very,
very great complexity and in one way or another, all of them are of concern to people here in this room.
(38:32):
Otherwise you would not be here.
We are at the point where could I request our technical help to switch off the sound system, please, so that we not the sound system.
Not as our system. The recording. Yes. So that we ceased to record.
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