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Story here. How will this affect monographs produced with public funds?
(Thanks to J. Brendan Ritchie for the pointer.)
The Government announcement is here:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2012/Jul/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research
Scroll down a little bit to get to a link to the Government's formal response to the Finch report, or go directly to it here:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2012/Jul/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research
The Higher Education Funding Council for England's comment is here:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2012/statementonimplementingopenaccess/
The question about monographs does not appear to be answered directly. Nor have I spotted anything that is explicitly about the humanities: the emphasis appears to be on the natural sciences, and to a lesser extent on the social sciences.
It is, however, pretty clear that open access will be promoted across the board. We may debate the relative merits of different open access models, how to help learned societies that depend on sales of publications, and whether to keep commercial publishers in business or jut put everything into a big free archive along the lines of http://arxiv.org/ . But my view is that the broad trend deserves an unequivocal welcome.
How are authors supposed to come up with the reported 2000 pound fee per article? (Maybe institutions will pay this for authors; I know I couldn't afford to pay that out of my salary…) What happens to not only monographs but also edited collections of papers, things like Cambridge Companions, etc?
It is worth noting that the UK is advocating Gold open access, where the author pays the publisher, rather than Green open access. It is one thing if you have a research grant that will pay for any forthcoming publications, but this would be a disaster if extended to the Humanities where there is a dearth of grant money.
From the news coverage that I've read it's hard to be clear exactly what's proposed, including how (whether) this applies outside of the natural sciences, what the implications are for monographs, and what counts as taxpayer-funded research (only grants from AHRC etc or anyone in a publicly-supported university?) Given the current government's recent track record on HE, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these questions hadn't really been considered so, while the idea of encouraging Open Access is admirable in principle, I fear how it will be applied. If universities have to pay to publish then some may start restricting what their staff can publish.
Further, it seems like they've forgotten that research is international. UK authors/institutions/funding councils will now be paying to make their research freely accessible globally, while still having to pay journal subscriptions in order to get access to non-UK research…
The European Commission has just announced a move in the same direction, although this relates specifically to work in the sciences:
I am not sure of the justification for a publication fee as high as £2,000 (see Michael Kremer's comment above). I suspect that includes a profit for commercial publishers. They obviously need a profit if they are to continue to exist, but it is not clear that the world of scholarship will continue to need them.
Cambridge University Press have announced an open-access venture in mathematics with a fee of £500. I don't know whether there will be a subsidy from the Press's other activities to keep the fee this low. But if £500 is possible for mathematics, it should certainly be possible for philosophy, given that peer review and other forms of quality control are likely to be at least as difficult in mathematics as in philosophy. Information on this venture, and a discussion of some issues, can be found on Timothy Gowers' blog, here:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/a-new-open-access-venture-from-cambridge-university-press/
Any publication fee at all is a significant change from current practice. If graduate students are expected to publish to get jobs, and junior faculty are expected to publish to keep jobs, and this has to come out of salaries, this will be a huge financial burden on those starting out in the field. Imagine a graduate student with a stipend of, say, $18000, or a junior faculty member with a before tax income of, say $60000 (these are fairly generous estimates) having to pay 500 pounds (or about $750) for each article published. Imagine that said graduate student publishes one article in a year, or said faculty member publishes 3 articles in a year. For the grad student or the faculty member, that is about 4% of gross income — equivalent to state income tax in many states. It would be much worse for the less advantaged — a faculty member who is making do with multiple low-paying adjunct positions, for example. But this very faculty member needs to publish to get out the trap he finds himself in. This is really a huge change in the way things work, and one that will benefit the already better off while pricing others out of the publication business altogether.
Michael Kremer has pointed out the financial burden that charges for publication would represent. The link provided by Richard Baron to Timothy Gowers blog (in comment 5) helps to bring out the problems here. The Gowers piece and the discussion that followed bring out the problems that there are even if institutions pay the fees for publication by faculty members and graduate students. Institutional money to serve as subventions for publication by philosophy faculty and graduate students would have to come off something else — and it cannot come off library budgets because libraries would still have to pay for subscriptions in order to go on making back issues of journals available. If the money has to come from somewhere, it will (very likely) come off the funds available for salaries and graduate stipends — in other words, even if one doesn't pay directly out of one's salary, salaries in general will reflect the costs of publication. The discussion on that Gowers site also brings out that the problems will be even more acute in countries like Spain, even if there are funds available (at publishers like Cambridge UP) for scholars in developing countries. The piece on the Gowers site pretty much assumes that everyone who writes a technical mathematical piece has an institutional affiliation and that payments for publication will be made by the institution; but the comparable assumption would be incorrect if made about philosophy: a journal like Philosophy gets unaffiliated people writing. (And many institutions, if they are willing to pay, might limit the subventions to full-time members of the faculty, excluding adjunct faculty and graduate students). The idea that comes out in the Gower piece is that someone who doesn't have an institution that will pay for publications could write to Cambridge UP and say 'I am penniless'. But that wouldn't be true in many cases. The idea that one should have to prove penury in order not to pay $750 to publish a piece in Philosophy is surely something philosophers should resist. Even the label 'gold open access' is creepy. It's a piece of public relations cover-up for publishers insisting that increased access by the public to scholarly publications should not come out of their profits.
Some letters to the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/18/open-access-plan-no-academic-spring
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