Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/147



HEFCE open-access monographs investigation

HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) is a quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) in the United Kingdom that translates the government’s higher education budget allocation into usable funds. Some of this goes in a teaching grant for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects (this funding has been withdrawn for the humanities subjects), while other portions of the budget are devolved to the major UK research councils. Aside from speciﬁc project funding, the other major way in which HEFCE funds research is called quality-related (QR) funding. This is awarded to institutions on the basis of an assessment exercise known as the ‘Research Excellence Framework’, which was preceded by a series of ‘Research Assessment Exercises’, which in turn have their root in the 1986 ‘research selectivity exercise’.43 These exercises now take place approximately every ﬁve years and are, it is fair to say, widely hated by UK academics who often consider them as bureaucratic exercises in quantiﬁcation.

Of interest to the subject at hand, however, is that, in April 2014, HEFCE announced that eligibility to submit to a post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (presumed to be ‘REF2020’) would depend upon an open-access component: a mandate. Speciﬁcally, authors must deposit the accepted version of their articles at the time of acceptance.44 However, as already mentioned in passing, it is notable that monographs (‘and other long-form publications’), edited collections, non-text outputs and data are all excluded from the mandate.45

From the rhetoric deployed by HEFCE and the Research Councils, some academics have surmised that these bodies would like to mandate monographs for a future exercise; after all, why should one form be deemed different from others in their eyes when both are supported by QR funding?46 However, in recognition of the additional barriers (and researcher sensitivities) surrounding open-access monographs, HEFCE has instead opted for now to mount an investigation into the subject, the ﬁrst national-level funding council investigation of its type. The investigation is being led by Professor Geoffrey Crossick, an ex-Vice Chancellor of the University of London and a Distinguished Professor of History. Crossick’s ﬁndings were expected to be released in the late summer/autumn of 2014.