What's next after the UKRI monographs policy roll out?
We've worked intensively on a special project to support publishers, institutions, and authors with the launch of UKRI's policy. Now we look ahead to what still needs collective action.
UKRI’s open access (OA) policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections took effect on 1 January 2024. Compared with journals, the transition to open access for books is a significant cultural and operational shift: print traditions run deep, business models vary widely, and publication timelines can last several years.
From UKRI’s announcement to the launch of the policy, Jisc’s team worked intensively on a special project to engage and support publishers, institutions, and authors, ensuring they understood the policy and that there were practical routes in place to support compliance.
How we helped the sector prepare for open access books
Introducing UKRI’s long-form policy was an ambitious initiative, given the relative immaturity of open access practices in book publishing. We worked with the UUK content negotiation strategy group to set out the sector’s core priorities for monograph agreements:
- Equitable, inclusive, fair and affordable agreements with academic book publishers
- Support open infrastructure to underpin open access academic books
- Foster institutional publishing via high-quality university presses
- Advocate for and enable authors to retain their rights
Focusing our efforts
Education and advocacy
We worked with publishers to explain the need for open access and alternative models. This included enabling diamond, green, and partial Book Processing Charge (BPC) routes to ensure authors in all subject areas could comply with the policy.
Bibliodiversity
We analysed REF 2021 and ResearchFish data to prioritise publisher negotiations that aligned with UKRI goals for bibliodiversity. This enabled us to identify smaller university presses and society publishers to negotiate with alongside the major commercial book publishers.
Negotiation
By the end of our project, we had negotiated 26 diamond or collective funding agreements with 19 publishers, secured lower Book Processing Charges at two university presses, and confirmed green open access policies at nine publishers.
Sustainability
UKRI’s policy supports a diversity of routes to open access. We championed non-Book Processing Charge routes, recognising the limited availability of funding, and ensuring that alternative models could keep costs manageable for the sector.
Policy tracking
To help authors identify compliant routes, we launched a new open access books feature for open policy finder, covering 20 publishers at launch. We are currently working on adding publisher policies to the database.
Community engagement
Our well attended webinars, like our “Mythbusters” series, were important in translating the policy into something stakeholders could understand. We also facilitated peer-to-peer dialogue, developed case studies, and released guidance materials to support institutional teams in understating policy nuances, decision making and communicating with senior leadership.
Workflows
While the use of the UKRI block grant is well understood and applied for the journals, the two-stage UKRI monographs ring-fenced fund required new workflows to be implemented within institutions. Teams provided practical recommendations, such as our guide to UKRI's fund for longform outputs, to address financial and administrative challenges, such as creating budget-holding accounts to manage reimbursement timelines.
Sustained engagement is needed for open access monographs
While our formal project may now have ended, sustained engagement is critical at this early stage of the policy implementation. Jisc and UKRI will continue to work closely together towards the shared goal of open access monographs.
Continued education to demystify how the policy can be achieved
We will continue to invite libraries, authors, and publishers to join Jisc-led workshops and to share feedback on diamond or collective funding pilots, so that real-life experiences can inform longer-term strategies. The resources, guides, and recordings made through the project remain available via the digital research community group and on our website. Other resources include UKRI’s researcher case studies, and COPIM’s author success stories. UKRI is also funding a project with RLUK to support libraries share what is working for them and to develop strategies accordingly.
Advocacy for non-Book Processing Charge routes
High Book Processing Charges continue to be a concern within the sector, with a fixed amount of funding available. We continue to support non-Book Processing Charges routes, working with UKRI to explore diamond models. As with journals, we will contribute to the development of guidance for publishers and institutions on agreements and compliance. We’ll also continue to support institutions with guidance on financial planning to enable them to adopt alternative models.
Green open access for monographs
Publishers and author views on defining acceptable versions of works for green open access still diverge. Using Open policy finder will make no-fee routes visible to authors, and we’ll continue to work toward shared definitions and visible no-fee routes.
Metadata and infrastructure
We’re working with OpenAlex, OAPEN and others to build better infrastructure, which is crucial for better tracking, discovery, and compliance.
Participation in wider conversations within the UK and across Europe. Through the Copim community and other networks, we’ll work towards aligned policies, shared infrastructure and sustainable funding streams across Europe.
Fitting into a wider open research agenda
Making books openly available is one step toward a research culture where all outputs, including articles, data, software, methods and peer review, are transparent and reusable. Lessons from the long-form policy roll-out inform many of our continued strategies for open research:
- Equity: ensuring that pay-to-publish routes do not limit authors without grants
- Infrastructure: considering open, interoperable systems (not proprietary) to make monitoring scalable
- Community leadership: to ensure that we continue a collaborative and data-led approach, involving all parties – libraries, publishers, authors, and funders – to drive change
Guidance
To help the sector achieve an increase in the publication of open access monographs, we’ve produced two web guides: one geared towards the needs of higher education institutions and one focused on researchers.
These web guides aim to outline clear guidance for publishing open access, helping the research sector to use funding strategically, investing in approaches that promote efficiency, and longer-term investment in open research, across the research ecosystem.
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