Academics Urge Peers To Self-Publish Research

Academics are looking to their own Open Access ventures to create new spaces for monograph publishing, a conference on OA in the humanities and social sciences heard last week.

Academic speakers also urged their peers to “take back agency for themselves” by bypassing traditional publishers and setting up their own initiatives for both monographs and journals.

The conference, “Open Access Futures in the Humanities and Social Sciences”, was run by publisher SAGE at the University of London’s Senate House last Thursday (24th).

David Sweeney, director for research, innnovation and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), said many scholars could not now be published by the traditional houses because of the financial squeeze on libraries. “Even work that is truly excellent and that they [the publishers] would like to publish cannot now be done because there is not enough money in library budgets. OA is an essential part of allowing more work to be published in monograph form,” he said.