OA Monographs: Making Mandates Reality

This half-day workshop galvanised a much-needed sector-wide conversation on OA monographs in the context of the UK’s policy landscape. Expert panels of speakers from the library, publishing and policy worlds outlined the current state-of-play and discussed how we can move to meet the imminent OA mandates from cOAlition S/Plan S in Europe and UKRI in the UK, and potential implications of the REF.

Featuring expert speakers from UKRI (Rachel Bruce) and Jisc (Caren Milloy), the event opened with a discussion of monograph policies and mandates before moving to an academic viewpoint from Professor Martin Eve (Birkbeck, University of London) who talked about various international OA funding models and the need to move quickly from pilot phases to business as usual.

The second half of the session touched briefly on the challenges of getting OA metadata into supply chains and systems often designed for closed books, and then discussed in more depth the concomitant challenges posed by metrics and reporting on OA books (Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Project Director at COUNTER). The afternoon closed with a view from the library perspective and expert speakers from the libraries at the Universities of York (Sarah Thompson), Aberdeen (Simon Bains) and Imperial College (Chris Banks) who spoke on how they are foregrounding OA at their institutions.

For more details, see the workshop report at https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.89184c66.