Wednesday 2 November 2022

1. Why is Open Access for Monographs
Important for Researchers?
From Compliance to Culture
Dr Emma Gallon (Books Manager, University of London Press)
JISC OA monograph myth busting one: compliance vs culture, 2 November 2022

2. University of London Press
• Launched December 2019, based at the School of
Advanced Study
• Humanities books and journals
• 20–25 books per year
• Predominantly open access publisher – c.70% OA
and growing
• Opening up humanities research

3. Open access compliance vs culture
• Benefits of open access
• OA monograph authors’ motivations (and deterrents)
• Implications

4. Benefits of open
access

5. Open access monograph authors’ motivations

6. Reach and accessibility
Opening up academic research via freely
available digital outputs based upon
research already funded by taxpayers -
provides a wider societal benefit
…given the subject matter and aims of our
book, it was important to remove as many
barriers to access as possible... For our
authors, we are also responsible for
platforming their work and enabling it to be
read as widely as possible
The wide availability ensured by OA maximises the impact of any monograph by opening
the work up to scholars for research purposes, as well as the general public and students
…an essential way to make academic research as
accessible as possible to as many people as possible
From a
practical point
of view, it has
made
teaching more
efficient and
easier to
acquire
sources
The advance of OA
monographs
means that works
can be accessed
instantly for free,
saving
international
students having to
pay high costs
By facilitating wider access, and removing
reader-facing paywalls to humanities
work, open access both enables a wider
range of people to engage with critical
historical work, and in the longer term
contributes to a greater variety of
perspectives in historical practice
Pay walls keeping academic research from
public consumption entrenches inequality, it
limits researchers access to knowledge
unless they are attached to wealthy
academic institutions. This overwhelmingly
means that researchers who come from
lower socio-economic backgrounds or from
the Global South are disproportionately
impacted

7. Reach and accessibility (cont.)
…facilitating the author's contribution to the field, and
facilitating other scholars' engagement with the author's work
Open access enables early career,
independent, precarious and established
scholars (and others) access to the latest
research. This enables people to situate
their work within current expertise in
the field and may help to promote
future collaboration and funding
opportunities. If you are an ECR,
independent or precarious scholar,
trying to increase your publication
record and your profile, open access is
essential. Open access increases the
citation potential of your work
The primary factor was
accessibility for readers. I know
that I will be able to
disseminate my research to as
wide a global audience as
possible and it won’t be behind
a paywall or exorbitant book
costs
Since the funded project was working at the intersection between
academic history, and family and local history, that many of our
readers would be drawn from these non academic areas. Therefore,
we felt it essential that the outputs of our publicly funded project
should published in an open access PDF version
Humanities research is often
relatable and has important
conclusions for contemporary
society and understandings of
the world, making this research
as widely available as possible
is important
As a publicly-funded project, it was important that the research be
shared as widely as possible, and that neither access to finance, nor
circumstance, nor academic affiliation should hinder that access.
And of course, it was an
especially good thing for
someone like me: an early
career researcher who had
just finished their PhD and
was desperate to find
academic work as soon as
possible. By publishing open
access, I would ensure that
my book - my research - was
immediately available to
anybody who heard about it
and wanted to look at it

8. Compliance
Our first concerns were about complying with the mandatory
requirement of our large research council grant (AHRC), to ensure
outputs were open access. In addition, all of the academic
contributors to the volume worked for universities where making
your research available in an open access format was necessary in
order to be included in the REF. As a new scholar, an open access
publication is a significant addition to my CV ('REFable' publications).
There are professional
reasons; very soon, all
monographs funded by UK
research grants will have to
be OA
I think that open access is becoming
increasingly important in the
academic world, especially when
thinking about REF requirements,
and so this was a sensible move for
my career.
Academic employers look very kindly on open access books
… for meeting REF standards…

9. Supervisors’ recommendations
The established scholars who I spoke to (e.g. old PhD
supervisors) were enthusiastic about the prospect of me
publishing my book open access, which not only reassured
me, but encouraged me to think that it was a good thing
I was particularly influenced by the words of my former PhD
supervisor who told me that ‘writing academic history was
more about building a readership than restricting one’

10. OA deterrents
To be honest, the open access question wasn’t high
on my list of priorities when going about the
publication of my book. My first priority was simply
to publish my research as a monograph, and to do
so in a manner that carry as much academic
respectability as possible so that I would be able to
find an academic job
…almost like vanity publishing, or like I'd self-published
an e-book, rather than that a publisher had published
my work 'properly’
Insofar as I thought about open access, I wasn’t
convinced it was a good thing. I had in my head a vague
equation between academic respectability and ivory-
tower inaccessibility; that is to say, it seemed
instinctively to me that the sorts of things which get
given away free were not as rigorous, prestigious etc. as
the sorts of things which are harder to come by, and that
academic books, being often very pricey, are the hardest
things of all to come by

11. Challenges of open access
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST OPEN ACCESS CHALLENGES OR CONCERNS FOR YOU? % OF VOTE
Finding funding for open access publication 55%
(Perceived) quality of publication 42%
Difficult to understand what my institution, funder or publisher requires me to do 32%
Long-term preservation of the online publication 26%
Predatory publishers 23%
Finding open access content as a reader 23%
Concern over how others may reuse my work 23%
Lack of available open access publication options in my field 19%
Additional workload to meet institution’s, funder’s or publisher’s policies 13%
Not relevant or useful for my discipline 6%
Source: SAS Open Access training session poll; February 2022 (n=40)

12. Concluding thoughts
If the goal is to shift from an environment and language of open access compliance to
that of an open research culture, important to understand researchers’ publication
motivations to inform:
o researcher support and education
o incentives and disincentives (and recognise their intended and unintended impacts)
o policy implementation and communication
o publishing models and options
RESPONSIBLE OPEN
RESEARCH /
GOOD RESEARCH
PRACTICE
Open access compliance Open research culture