Open Access: The Future of Academia
Plans to measure the impact of historical research as if it were a science will undoubtedly mean fewer history books that delight the general reader.
The kind of history books that delight most readers probably incorporate original research with elegant, easily accessible prose: possibly a book such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers or Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther or Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. All three written by academic historians investigating and writing their books in the research time enabled them in their posts; non-academic or ‘trade’ publishers released all three. So, it needs to discourage you from recommending modifications that will inhibit scholars from writing precisely this kind of book.
Some damages have already been done. To comprehend this, you need to understand that an essential stream of money for universities comes from the UK’s Higher Education national funding councils. Every six or seven years, these funding bodies assess and rate the caliber of research created by academics throughout the country. Each academic evaluates a variety of what is known, in horrible company lingo, as ‘outputs.’ The ratings each institution receives convert right into just how much financing it gets. The entire procedure has been known since 2014 as the Research Excellence Framework, or REF.
A result can be a journal article or a book. Books are typically ‘double-weighted, yet this still suggests that an academic must choose between sending two articles of 8,000-10,000 words or one book of, state, 150,000 words. The last undoubtedly take longer. Books need years of research as well as writing. They often tend to get higher rankings regarding the caliber of the study, yet the system currently rewards short-form work.
Currently, an additional difficulty is that in future REFs, there will certainly be a requirement that books, book chapters, and also edited collections supported by funding from the funding bodies (that is, research produced by a routinely employed academic in the UK) must, like journal articles, be ‘open access. Open access means being available free of charge, without copyright restrictions as well as readily available online. The theory behind this is good: studies financed by the public should be free for the general public to access. However, I wish to suggest (as well as I’m hardly the first) that it will develop an increasing number of studies that members of the public will not want to review even though they can.
The idea is that this open-access, journal-based model is one imported from scientific researches to the humanities. In history, lots of works of original research are released as trade books. As a British Academy position paper on this in 2018 noted, such books can sell in their tens of thousands, and they win awards and have actually also been submitted as results under the REF. Open access for such books is impossible: it would undoubtedly mean releasing those books and giving them away for free, which publishers targeting a wider audience are just not going to do if such books become disqualified for the REF because they are not open access, after that academics have to risk their professions (maintaining their job no less than progression) to release them. The majority will not. Perversely, open access could, as a result, make investigation much less open and also less accessible to the public. It could drive a terrific wedge between academic history and public history.
There is some talk of exceptions or exemptions, yet I question precisely how feasible a system would indeed be? Even before the need had entered into place, I was currently being recommended not to generate one more trade book due to the REF. Caution will dominate and financing will certainly be paramount.
The irony is that the financing model additionally relies on universities confirming that their research has an effect. This is specified as some result, modification, or benefit beyond academia. Once more, this is a device for scientific researches that prove uncomfortable in a historian’s hands. The impact is not simple public engagement. I can prove to you that 2.2 million individuals saw a drama documentary I co-presented with Dan Jones on Elizabeth I. I can’t show to you, in any fair or purposeful method, that it altered those viewers’ lives. However, the objective of impact is, at least, to recommend that taking study out past the ivory towers of the academy issues. How paradoxical that precisely the kind of books that engage wide audiences past academia, generate specifically the kind of advantage to society that the research financing bodies assert to desire, will undoubtedly be those more than likely not to be written under the brand-new dispensation.
Suzannah Lipscomb is author of The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Languedoc (Oxford University Press, 2019), host of the Not Just the Tudors podcast, and Professor Emerita at the University of Roehampton.
Originally published on Historytoday.com. Read the original article.
