First meeting of HEFCE Expert Reference Group on Open Access Monographs

I'm pleased to say that I was able to participate in the first meeting of the HEFCE Expert Reference Group on Open Access Monographs a few weeks ago. Having confirmed with HEFCE, I can also now make available the minutes of that meeting on the 4th November and would be interested to hear from anybody with comments by either email or Twitter.

I have a few thoughts of my own on the document and on the process itself but will confine myself to just one here. There is a strong focus on an evidence-based approach throughout, which is, of course, to be commended. In many cases, though, and from my experience on other projects, I wonder whether the type of data that would ideally be collected are also impossible data. They might also be strongly normative data, reflecting a description of the current environment, without ever broaching the possibility of how things could look (aside from the enormous practical problems of any kind of metric in publishing).

First meeting of HEFCE Expert Reference Group on Open Access Monographs was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at eve.gd: Martin Paul Eve on November 20, 2013.