The English Association’s Higher Education Committee, the Institute of English Studies, and University English have responded to the REF2029 Consultation on Open Access.
With huge thanks to Professor Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh), Chair of Unit of Assessment sub-panel 27 in REF2021, for leading on this important collaborative work, and to all our colleagues in our subject communities with whom this response was developed.
Times Higher Education cited our response in their article, ‘UK learned societies blast REF open access proposals for books‘, which was published on 18 June 2024:
…Three bodies representing English literature – the English Association, the Institute of English Studies and University English – have also criticised the inclusion of scholarly editions in the open access plans, claiming the “cost of making these ‘gold standard’, multi-volume, collaborative outputs OA would be crushing for publishers and universities, making it unlikely they could be included in a REF return”.
“It is surely not the intention of this policy that lengthy, high-quality, transformative research should be outside the scope of REF,” they explain in their consultation submission.
Warning about the lack of sufficient funding to accompany the proposed plans, the bodies recommend that “longform open access publishing should thus only be encouraged in this REF cycle, and the essential funding and infrastructure put in place ready for the next”.
