Scholarly monographs and other long-form outputs must be made available to open access within two years of publication if they are to be submitted to the UK’s next Research Excellence Framework, funders have proposed.
Launching a consultation, the country’s funding bodies have reiterated their long-stated ambition that the open-access mandate that currently applies to journal articles should be extended to books for the 2029 assessment of national research standards, which governs the distribution of around £2 billion annually in block grants.
As well as allowing a two-year embargo, longer than is allowed for articles, the proposed policy does allow a series of exceptions, including where “the only appropriate publisher, after liaison and consideration, is unable to offer an open access option that complies with the REF policy”; and where “the publication concerned requires an embargo period that exceeds the stated maxima and was the most appropriate publication venue for the output”.
These exceptions are particularly intended to ensure compliance for long-form outputs that are published overseas – which represented around one in five of those considered for the 2014 REF.
