There are many benefits to open research, and in recent years there has been increased funding made available for academics in receipt of grant funding to enable open access.
For example, the Wellcome Trust provides funding for both articles and monographs to be published, and UKRI has provided block grants since 2013 to assist research performing organisations in implementing open access changes and to cover costs for gold open access (the publisher’s pdf made freely available on publication).
Substantial progress has been made in the amount of scholarly research that is now freely available.
The Research Excellence Framework used the 2014 open access policy to drive change – and while this was largely a success, there were some unintended consequences (not least the additional administrative burden). The difficulty now in REF further extending its policy, expanding from journal articles to include longform publications, is that there is no funding provided to support this outside of QR funding – and the “green” route is not readily available (with most publishers allowing one chapter from a monograph to be made available, not the whole monograph in accepted version format). Therefore research funded by larger bodies like UKRI or the Wellcome Trust will easily meet the proposed changes to policy, but unfunded research will struggle.
