Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Royal Historical Society

Executive Summary

We support the introduction of Open Access to publicly-funded research in a form that will protect and enhance academic freedom and quality in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the STEM subjects. We consider that this is best achieved by a system which:

accepts as equals a Gold route (likely to be taken by many if not most STEM journals) and a Green route (likely to be taken by many if not most HSS journals);

through planning and consultation develops terms for the Green route which will sustain moderately-costed, high-quality HSS journals, ie through differential embargo periods and licenses which permit educational but not derivative or commercial use;

permits UK academics to publish anywhere in the world by allowing for cases where international policies do not follow UK government mandates.

Evidence

The Royal Historical Society, founded in 1868, is the oldest and largest learned society devoted to the promotion of historical scholarship in the United Kingdom. We have over 3,000 Fellows, mainly academics but also including curators, archivists, librarians and independent scholars, all of whom are engaged in advanced historical scholarship. We do not publish a journal apart from our annual Transactions and, unlike many other learned societies, we do not rely on earnings from publications for a substantial portion of our income. Even so, we have serious concerns about the implications of current OA policy for the historical profession as a whole.

We very much welcome this Committee’s enquiry, coming on the heels of the Lords Science and Technology Select Committee enquiry, and we are very conscious that the 288 pages of that enquiry’s written evidence (http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/science-technology/Openaccess/OpenAccessevidence.pdf) give ample scope for the full diversity of views on this question in the academic and publishing world and beyond, including our own views (which can be found at pp. 207–11). The RHS position coincides to a great extent with those of the Academy of Social Sciences and the British Academy, which represent the experiences of the HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) disciplines more broadly. We appreciate therefore that the BIS Committee enquiry would benefit from a short, targeted response to what appear to us to be the most currently pressing issues.

STEM

The current argument over OA publishing is only the latest of a series of conflicts arising from the fact that national research policy is driven almost entirely by models derived from the STEM subjects: the concentration of research funding on large, collaborative projects; the modelling of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessors on STEM patterns of publishing; the definition and prioritisation of “impact” on STEM criteria; the defunding of research Master’s degrees; and now OA. (For evidence that “STEM” criteria are driven even more narrowly by the biomedical and industrial sectors, see the submission from the London Mathematical Society to the Lords Committee enquiry.) This policy direction is driven by the overwhelmingly large share of the research income budget taken by the STEM subjects, but it runs the risk—especially cumulatively—of substantially degrading the quality and international prominence of HSS research in the UK, which has benefits to society well beyond its share of income, not least to the majority of UK undergraduates who study non-STEM subjects.

“Gold”

Specifically, the current policy direction of both RCUK and HEFCE on OA—“transition to Gold”—reflects the very different position of journals and their funding in STEM subjects and in HSS subjects. STEM research is very well funded, and APC funds have long been regularly built into STEM research grants. HSS scholars often need, and normally receive, little funding beyond the research time built into their posts, and they neither receive at present nor are likely to receive under any of the proposed future mechanisms a substantial share of the APC pot. HSS journals publish many articles by PhD students, recent PhDs, early-career scholars, scholars on temporary contracts, independent and retired scholars, and scholars employed by non-academic organisations, none of whom are likely to have access to APC funds. Most HSS articles are single-authored, not embedded in large laboratory-based groups where senior scholars and research grants can “carry” younger scholars.

Furthermore, the nature of an HSS article is very different from that of a STEM article. It is typically much longer (thus many fewer APCs are available), more of a creative work than a work of reportage, the object of much more intensive peer review and editorial work, its IP protected only by copyright and not by patent, and with a much longer shelf-life—its value to specialists and non-specialists alike lasts for decades. As a result, HSS journals are expensive to produce and not very attractive to commercial publishers. Most history journals are published by non-profits and academic presses, subscriptions are low (both for institutions—typically around £250 p.a. -- and individuals—at most £40 p.a.) and what profits they earn are channelled back into the editorial process or into the learned societies which publish them. In order to maintain the quality essential to international recognition they would require high APCs from precisely those people, HSS scholars, least likely to have funding for them. In any case the market for APCs is unlikely to be able to squeeze profits out of these non-profit publishers without damaging the underlying research culture.

“Green”

We welcome the change of tone taken by the funding bodies in response to doubts raised about the universal applicability of the “Gold” model. In 2012 the talk was of the “transition to Gold”; now the Minister has said that Green is a “legitimate” albeit “second-best” alternative, and RCUK insists that “we are not anti-Green”. The “Green” model, suitably adapted, fits HSS needs better than Gold. But the form in which Green is adopted needs to be a matter of careful planning and consultation—genuine consultation, not, as HEFCE is still describing consultation in its evidence to the Lords Committee, “informed acceptance of our policy position”. What length of embargo period is appropriate to maintain the modest subscription levels of HSS journals? What type of license is compatible with minimal IP protections for HSS scholars who cannot patent their work, and with the extensive use of third-party material which is increasingly difficult to obtain nowadays even with separate licenses? These are matters that require care and discrimination, not a one-size-fits-all policy. MIT negotiates embargo terms with individual publishers and requires only that the author licenses the institutional archive for dissemination. It is sometimes said that there is “no evidence” that short embargo periods would endanger HSS journals—but this can only be because no well-established HSS journals yet provide extensive OA. The only studies that we know of—the Mellon-funded study of 2009 (http://www.nhalliance.org/bm~doc/hssreport.pdf) and the ALPSP study of 2012 (http://www.publishers.org.uk/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=757&Itemid=)—warned that adopting short embargo periods on a STEM model could seriously damage the sustainability of HSS journals over the long term. Following the lead of Harvard and MIT, we should make experiments and encourage (as the Mellon study also does) HSS academics to extend their OA archiving before precipitately applying a mandate based on STEM criteria, a very clumsy tool of policy-making indeed.

International

While we understand the government’s desire to put the UK in the vanguard of the OA movement, any initiatives must be taken within hailing distance of the rest of the world, or risk isolating UK academics from the world of international scholarship. Much evidence has been cited that the government’s model is the one being adopted globally, but nearly all of this evidence is once again based on initiatives in the STEM subjects, especially medicine, such as those taken by Wellcome and the NIH. There is evidence that the UK government’s attempt to extend this model precipitately to all subjects is being criticised internationally for giving a good cause (OA) a bad name. The American Historical Association reported that at its recent annual conference “the one area of clear consensus was that the recent “Finch Report” in the UK was a most unfortunate intervention” (http://blog.historians.org/annual-meeting/1912/peer-review-history-journals-and-the-future-of-scholarly-research). The head of the OA working group at MIT writes to us that “one of our concerns is that OA will get a bad name in the UK—and justifiably so if it is pushed in thoughtless ways—and that once that happens it is going to be an uphill struggle to get people to agree to anything”. We understand that STEM-driven policies at EU level are also now being resisted by member governments who are seeking “differential” implementation of OA to suit different disciplines.

Academic Freedom, Creativity and Dissemination

As a Society we are strongly in favour of widening access. We were something of an OA pioneer when in 2000 with funding from the AHRC we made our prime editorial project—the Bibliography of British and Irish History, a serial we had been maintaining for 80 years—completely open access. After nine years of support AHRC de-funded many of its digital infrastructure projects and we were forced to seek alternative support from a commercial publisher—an experience that has made us keenly aware of the fragility and expense of HSS research even (sometimes especially) in a digital age.

We are strongly in support of developing a culture of self-archiving amongst HSS scholars, in conjunction with journal publication funded by moderate subscriptions. The Harvard-MIT model offers one way forward; there are others. What seriously worries us is that a rushed and indiscriminate implementation of OA will imperil the very quality of the product that we are so keen on disseminating. It will also replace an inequality of access with a new inequality of opportunity to publish, thereby undermining the aims of its advocates. Many of our STEM colleagues share our doubts about Gold models which seem to reward commercial publishers rather than squeeze them, and which threaten to impose a new bureaucracy—the internal decision-making processes of universities—on academics’ freedom to publish what and where they will. In his written evidence to the Lords Committee, the Minister said, “It is important for [universities] to have autonomy and flexibility in such decisions so that they may use their funding most efficiently and in a way that best suits their publication priorities.” This is a surprising, even shocking statement to most academics who had hitherto thought that “such decisions” and “publication priorities” were a matter for the individual academic, not for their managers. If access to Gold funds becomes not just a marker of prestige inside universities but a vital mode of access to publication, then one of the principal sources of creativity in and the high international standing of the UK HE system—academic freedom—will be lost. In relieving the reader of the cost of publication, we must not transfer responsibility for covering the cost of publication to university bureaucracies that are not competent—and in truth do not want—to make academic decisions.

Peter Mandler, President
Nicola Miller, Vice President for Research Policy

6 February 2013