Plan S
Cambridge University g
this hasn’t taken significant sustained investment and resource – but innovation seldom comes for free. The spearheads of innovation that have pushed the UK forward include the Finch Report, delivered in 2012, through to the announcement that REF 2021 outputs would need to be made available through OA channels in 2014. As you might expect, those universities with more research are more exposed to policy innovations around OA. In 2000, 43.3 per cent of the UK’s OA output was contributed by the Russell Group universities. By 2016, this number had grown to 58.6 per cent. Even within these top universities, a natural stratification emerges with UCL leading the pack with 13.8 per cent of the Russell Group’s output (translating to around 8 per cent of the UK’s total OA output); followed by Oxford, Imperial and Cambridge producing between 9 per cent and 11 per cent of the Russell Group’s output. There is then a further cluster of Manchester, King’s, Edinburgh and Bristol each accounting for 6 to 7 per cent of the Russell Group’s output. Finally, there is a less stable grouping that includes Southampton, Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham, all contributing around 5 per cent in 2016 but which also may be considered to extend to Glasgow and Birmingham. This latter grouping is less stable than the upper groupings, which see less change with time. All these institutions are publishing more than 60
24 Research Information April/May 2019
“Those universities with more research are more exposed to policy innovations around open access”
per cent and, in many cases, close to 70 per cent of their output through OA channels. Measurement of open access through
government mandate is clearly driving behaviour in the UK’s research institutions in a way that is not so evident either on the continent or in the US. The natural competitiveness in the Russell Group is mixing with the impending REF 2021 exercise to be the newest driver of OA in the UK. Institutions, seeking to ensure that a maximal number of amount of outputs for the return, are strongly incentivised to increase their proportion of OA outputs. We began this piece by observing that measurement drives behaviour, and that there can be unintended consequences. In this case, the obvious effect is that the research-intensive institutions that are members of the Russell Group are more susceptible to this type of measurement than most of the UK’s research institutions, since such large portions of their funding depend on Research England’s block funding. However, what we see is an increase in the overall percentage of the
UK’s research output being centred around Russell Group institutions – at 58.6 per cent in 2016, up more than 15 per cent since the turn of the millennium. This indicates that the ability to pay for open access at scale appears to be centralising in Russell Group institutions, with others being left behind the curve. In 2021, this will inevitably have an impact on the choices that smaller institutions can make regarding their REF returns, the results of those returns, and the potential funding balance going forward. Research England is clearly not insensitive to these challenges, as it has included a number of options for institutions to argue for exceptions and include a percentage of non-OA outputs. However, the direction is clear: open access will form part of the REF for the first time and it has been thoroughly embedded in the most recent guidance on submission, panel criteria and working methods published by Research England. This is a strong signal to the community and a strong ‘measurement’ that pushes the sector toward open access. Achieving change forces us to embrace
new initiatives that renew our progress. Nonetheless, measurement remains a tool to be used with care. It will be interesting to return to the data in years to come to quantify the large-scale effects of these interventions and initiatives.
Daniel Hook is CEO at Digital Science
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