With the ghosts of REF 2021 circling over the audit processes, there are some new hauntings waiting in the wings…
On Friday 6th August 2021, UKRI finally released their long anticipated open access (OA) policy. Their new policy aligns UKRI, and therefore all of the UK’s seven Research Councils, with plan S, “an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.”
However, rather than thinking about UKRI or plan S funded research and the intensions of these policies, in this brief post, I want to entertain what the future for open access is likely to be for communities at Greenwich. Of course, we support our researchers in compliance with any funder requirements in relation to OA, but the efficacy of external policies can be complicated.
One unintended consequence of a multitude of OA policies emerging across the early part of the early 21st C. has been the fixing of the operational definition of openness. However, “openness appears to be a term with multiple understandings and no fixed definition” (Moore, 2017.) Indeed, as Moore notes, whilst this might cause political difficulties, it is not per se a problem as ” it represents a multitude of positions and strategies but is generally recognisable across cooperative communities of practice” (Moore, 2017.)
The spaces left between iterations of multiple policies are an inevitable area of concern for those trying to support openness as politico-philosophical approach towards a knowledge commons and, simultaneously, ensuring grant winners comply with their funder requirements.
It is worth us re-considering some of the differences between the previous UKRI OA policy and the REF 2021 OA policy. They were both instituted several years ago and several years apart, each of which intending to transition their stakeholder groups towards open access routes to scholarly publishing via either the Gold route (which was as-they-were-then RCUK’s explicit preferred route) or the the Green route, with which each policy had defined different parameters thereof.
As such, different researchers have various experiences of these distinct policies- not forgetting that there of course a raft of other international OA policies that researchers may have experienced. This creates issues where people have become used to handling policy requirements rather than necessarily actively engaging in open access directly. With a new generation of policies now emerging, this is significant as the transitional period of the previous policy era has now passed. The variety of exceptions that were previously offered to support the migration to open access are likely to be depreciated in breadth and depth in the new era, and as such, we need a new approach to better understand and comply with the new open access policies.
The goals of open access are many and varied, as too are the benefits of it. It would be a crying shame for openness to become a source of ire for researchers as bureaucratic tool. To avoid that pitfall and ensure that open access brings benefits to enhance the impact of research, communities beyond the academy as well as benefitting researchers and the university, I would strongly encourage researchers to continually appraise their strategies and open practices, and right now would be an excellent opportunity to come and speak with us in the Office for Scholarly Communications to best support your compliance with internal and external policies.
References
Moore, Samuel. (2017.) A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research, Revue française des sciences de l‘Information et de la Communication. [Online.], 11 | 2017, posted on July 01, 2017 , consulted on August 16, 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/3220; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220