Don’t wait to tackle open access books cash challenge, REF told

There is of course a simple solution: remove all OA requirements from REF for all disciplines.

"But it was difficult to see how the “intractable” issue of funding open access might be addressed, given that the University of Oxford estimated the proposed mandate would have cost it £20 million for the current REF cycle alone, with a sector-wide roll-out likely to cost “hundreds of millions” of pounds." **Only if you do it by BPCs alone** Bit tired of everyone pretending that there aren't already loads of other funding mechanisms out there for OA books that are much cheaper and would mean entire UK monograph output could flip to OA at fraction of those silly figures. My question is who benefits from pretending this isn't the case and reiterating the tired old 'millions of pounds' myth?

Wellcome Trust and UKRI require OA, but they fund it. The REF is meant to be an exercise that assesses the most excellent of our research, no research outputs should not be assessed due to whether they are open access or not. Open research should continue to be assessed as part of the environment/culture section of the REF. There should be no open access policy. Let institutes have their own open access policies and workflows, and not have outputs not included because it took them 2 days too many to put an accepted manuscript in a repository - even though it won't be made open for a further 3 months!