We had a session today with the College of Arts & Humanities looking at open access issues and the new REF policy. These are the resources we talked about and a few more for exploring the topic further.
Policy Compliance
- HEFCE post-2014 REF Open Access Policy and our guidance on how to comply with it (PDF). We also have a guide to RIS (PDF) and publishing to Cronfa, our institutional repository.
- Swansea University’s Open Access Policy (PDF)
- Sherpa Juliet database for checking the open access policies of specific funders
Journal Articles
- Sherpa Romeo database for checking publisher policies – the “post-print” is the version required by the REF. Contact us (iss-research@swansea.ac.uk) if you have difficulty working out the policy – it’s not always clear.
- The British Academy 2014 report on “Open access journals in Humanities and Social Science” and other open access discussions can be found on their website.
- The Open Library of Humanities is a promising new publication model due to launch in 2015.
Monographs
- HEFCE’s Monographs and Open Access report (2015) (“set up to consider the place of monographs in the arts, humanities and social science disciplines, and how they fit into the developing world of open access to research”)
- JISC’s OAPEN-UK project (“a collaborative research project gathering evidence to help stakeholders make informed decisions on the future of open access scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences”)
- Open book platforms: OAPEN library and Directory of Open Access Books
Book Chapters
- The value of book chapters? “How to Bury Your Academic Writing” (blog post by Deevy Bishop from 2012) vs “Unbundling is Over-rated: On the value of contributing to an edited book” (blog post in reply by Terry Clague from 2015)
- Checking for green OA policies: Spreadsheet of replies from publishers in response to inquiries about self-archiving book chapters. This is maintained by a group of librarians on an ad-hoc basis.
General Discussion on Open Access & the Humanities
- Martin Eve is a key commentator on the topic (e.g. this article from the Guardian) and has also authored the open access book “Open Access and the Humanities“. He is one of the co-founders of Open Library of Humanities.
- “Open Access: a perspective from the humanities” by Peter Mandler (2014) is a useful overview of the history and current state of play.
Slides from the session today are here but we will be blogging in more detail on some of the topics over the coming months.
