5 September 2025
Kevin Sanders is the OA Engagement Lead for the Open Book Collective. He has worked in multiple areas of academic librarianship over many years and in UK HE Research Offices. Kevin co-founded and co-operated the Journal of Radical Librarianship.
Tom Grady is Work Package Lead for the Copim Opening the Future programme. Prior to this, he worked in public and academic libraries and was a founding team member of the UK’s first jointly-run and library-led open access publisher, White Rose University Press.
This article is based on a presentation given at a webinar held by the Academic Libraries North group on Tuesday 12 June. The theme of the webinar was ‘Supporting and encouraging authors to publish OA Monographs with no REF2029 mandate’. Tom Grady and Kevin Sanders from the Copim Open Book Futures project presented on the challenges and opportunities presented by open access for books, and shared some practical advice and advocacy arguments for authors and librarians.
About Copim Open Book Futures (OBF)
The Copim OBF team is an international project group of scholars, publishers, librarians, and infrastructure providers funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund. They’re working together to build and sustain an ecosystem for open access book publishing that supports a diversity of OA book publishing initiatives and models, particularly within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
UK Higher Education in crisis
As the final summer semesters of 2024 drew to a close and graduation ceremonies around the country took place, a total of 64 UK universities were running redundancy programmes. By summer of 2025, that figure had grown to nearly 100 UK universities. Queen Mary University’s branch of the UCU union has a live webpage of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations, and closures taking place across the UK HEI sector and it is clear that the majority of departments under the axe are in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. This is noteworthy because these are the departments that typically publish monographs – but the scholars and scholarship in these fields are facing genuine existential threats.
As Judith Fathallah, an early career researcher, has noted, “authors of academic works and textbooks have a role to play and a degree of agency in our publishing choices”. The received wisdom down the ages has been that in order to progress one’s career in AHSS, scholars (particularly early career scholars) must publish with the most prestigious publishers, those known for high quality books in their field. But Fathallah goes on to point out that scholars who are publishing high quality research that is being read by broader global audiences, and that is delivering increased impact – even these scholars remain “precariously and tenuously employed”. Legacy publishing strategies no longer produce the rewards they did for earlier academic cohorts. As of August 2025, the UCU union reported that 64% of academic research staff are on a fixed-term contract.
As such, we posit that if scholars believe in an equitable transition to open access, they need to exercise their power of choice when selecting publishers and ‘be the change they want to see’. Their departments and libraries need to support them in this too. Whilst crude metrical analyses of publications seldom withstand critical investigation, the citation advantages associated with open access books are more beneficial to a scholar than the prestige of legacy publishing, which no longer reliably results in employment with enhanced remuneration packages (e.g. pensions, paid leave, etc.). As such, scholars should seek to work with librarians to ensure library budgets support publishers aligned with the values of authors, and authors should work with their libraries to help build a case for supporting an open access future that is more equitable, bibliodiverse, and sustainable.
Wider political contexts
At around the same time as last summer’s final semesters, the UK held a general election. Anyone reading the news or social media in the lead up to the election surely can’t have failed to notice that universities and degrees were something of a political football in the election coverage. There were frequent claims in mainstream media that universities were “failing”, that degrees were “getting easier” and that some courses were “worthless”. The Daily Telegraph quoted the Conservatives vowing to “outlaw rip-off degrees so that no more students are lured on to courses that don’t deliver the outcomes people deserve” (those outcomes, presumably, referencing graduates’ earning potential). The so-called “Mickey Mouse” degrees targeted in stories like these were invariably in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities. The Daily Express created a list of five degrees whose graduates earn the least and they included courses in sociology, social policy, performing arts and creative arts and design. Contemporary politics and the discourses surrounding higher education are detrimental to creating vibrant and healthy research and publishing environments for scholars, and this is something that Copim is mindful of in our outreach to institutions, librarians, scholars, funders, and others.
Changing scholarly environment
These financial and political developments in HE were/are the background to a changing scholarly communications and publishing environment: traditional sales of academic books have been gradually declining for some time. According to the 2023 Ithaka S+R Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs report, there has been a “decline in monograph sales over the last couple of decades, [and] margins on academic books are so thin that publishers may fear that anything that threatens to cannibalize anticipated print sales of a scholarly title… is a threat to its viability”. The same report concludes, however, that open access versions of books could actually act as a shop window for publishers. Could it be that OA could be a useful tool for AHSS departments to prove their relevance, their reach and impact, and counter this discourse about Mickey Mouse degrees? Unlocking books from ivory towers of small print runs and paywalls and allowing them to be shared freely and globally has been shown to demonstrate uptake of AHSS research – it is no magic bullet but surely demonstrating global readership and usage makes it more difficult to portray these disciplines as trivial, frivolous or irrelevant?
Mandating OA for books through the REF
Another coincidence of timing in summer 2024: Research England ran a sector-wide consultation on whether to mandate open access publication of scholarly monographs through the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) audit. While the use of mandates and policies to yield cultural changes in scholarly publishing remains contentious, UK national research funding has a long history of deploying such policies, with the Medical Research Council first enacting an OA policy in 2006, and UKRI appending their OA policy and making books and longform outputs in-scope from January 1 2024. (It is perhaps worth noting too that, beyond the UK, national OA monograph mandates are proliferating in Europe.)
In the supporting communications from REF regarding the potential inclusion of books and longform outputs to their OA policy for 2029 onwards, there was no mention of the possibility of granting more money towards helping make OA for books happen. So it is a measure of how tense things were that scholars wondered aloud on social media if this was “designed by the Government to kill off the Humanities”. Many authors and societies were vocal in their opposition to mandating OA for books, arguing that they would have less freedom of author choice and fewer venues for publication. Or, at least, fewer venues unless they had access to extra money: many publishers have no financial mechanism for publishing OA books beyond charging often-expensive one-off fees (aka book processing charges/BPCs) which can be anything from c.£10-£15k or more, per book. Many scholars and their libraries or institutions don’t have the money to pay these fees. So with an OA mandate but no money to fund it, departments whose scholars write books would have been between a rock and a hard place – ‘killing off the humanities’ indeed.
Research England decided not to implement a mandate in this REF cycle, in the face of opposition from authors, societies, and some research offices. But while there is no mandate this time round, the guidance is clear on the next REF “an open access requirement for submission of longform outputs will be in place for the next assessment exercise, with implementation from 1 January 2029.” In terms of the research and writing lifecycle of an academic monograph this is really not far away: libraries, scholars and publishers need to be thinking about this now and the sector urgently needs alternatives to BPCs if we don’t want to see the mandate come into effect without it imposing further crippling financial burdens on libraries and their parent HEIs. Put simply, complying with an OA mandate for books from January 2029 will not be financially possible through one-off BPC charges alone. Crossing our fingers and hoping it will all work out is not a strategy – AHSS departments are already in a fight for their lives.
Happily, alternatives exist in the form of cost-effective community-led Diamond OA models, several of which Copim OBF has been helping to develop (though there are many more too), where there are no paywalls for readers and no author-facing BPCs.
We urge librarians, research offices and academic departments to look into publishing initiatives like the Open Book Collective, OA book funding models like Opening the Future, and community infrastructure like the Thoth open metadata and OA book dissemination platform. Working in collaboration – not competition – models and initiatives like these offer plausible alternative ecosystems to the legacy publishing models that are no longer supporting scholars adequately and which frequently have no OA books solution other than BPCs. Librarians wishing to build a case for financial support for these programs and others like them can find practical information and successful case studies in the three-part Copim blog series “How can I persuade my institution to support collective funding for open access books?”
These views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of UKSG.
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