Usage of higher education institutional repositories and “Green” open access for longform publications

This study and report were delivered by Information Power for The British Academy. This report provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of both qualitative and quantitative data concerning the deposit, discoverability, and use of longform open access (OA) materials in repositories.

In March 2025, the British Academy commissioned Information Power to carry out a study into how higher education institution repositories and “Green” OA is used for longform publications.

The report brings together interviews and surveys with library leaders, quantitative data, and the perspectives of academics in the humanities and social sciences and shows a nuanced and inconsistent picture. While there is support for the principle of Green OA for longform, there remain challenges around strategic oversight and funding, as well as issues around formats, rights and reading practices.

Professor Lindsay Farmer FBA, Publishing lead for the Academy, and Professor Margot Finn FBA identified three key priorities to focus on if green OA is to become a sustainable reality:

• A clear strategy for longform OA. Progress will require a joined‑up approach that is co‑designed by funders, universities, libraries, publishers and scholarly communities across the country. Such a strategy should clarify aims, roles and timelines; align repository standards and metadata requirements to improve searchability; and provide for monitoring and evaluation that recognises the specificities of monographs, edited volumes and scholarly editions.
• Sustainable funding and infrastructure. Targeted investment—in Diamond and community‑led models, and in repository capabilities (rights management, accessibility, usability and persistent identifiers)—is essential if OA books are to be both publishable and usable.
• Meaningful author engagement and protection. Policy must address legitimate concerns about version quality, third‑party rights, career incentives and international readerships. Early‑career researchers, people with fewer financial means, and those publishing image‑rich or archival material should not be disadvantaged by the route to openness we collectively choose.

• Most universities lack a dedicated longform OA strategy. Existing policies, developed for journal articles, are inconsistently extended to books. Most focus on encouraging academics to voluntarily embrace longform OA and on supporting case-by-case compliance with funder policies.

• OA publishing is viewed by many of the stakeholders with whom we engaged as the preferred approach, but there are problems. Gold OA is viewed as financially unsustainable, with book-processing charges (BPCs) averaging £10,000–£20,000. Institutions are experimenting with community-led and Diamond OA models, but budgets remain constrained and long-term funding mechanisms are unclear. Green OA is perceived as a less desirable way forward.

• Many academics, especially in SHAPE (social sciences, humanities, and the arts for people and the economy) disciplines, view Green OA as a “last-resort” access route rather than a valued dissemination route. Authors support the principle that everyone should have access to their book or book chapter. However, they are much more positive about Gold OA dissemination of the publisher’s version of record (VoR), and are often reluctant to deposit author accepted manuscript versions in repositories, perceiving this avenue to OA as potentially harmful to professional reputation and inferior in format and reading experience to published versions. For early-career researchers especially, aligning with well-known publishers is still seen as critical for career progression, tenure, and professional recognition, creating an incentive for Gold OA and disincentive to deposit a submitted manuscript in a repository.

• Repository environments do not provide strong support for the engagement and extended reading and annotation that SHAPE scholars desire. Institutional repositories aspire to take on functions of the broader publishing ecosystem, but without sufficient funding this ambition risks creating fragile, fragmented, and unsustainable services. Most institutional repositories are optimised for journal articles, not books, which bring specific challenges including complex formats, metadata inconsistencies, and copyright complexities. It is nearly impossible to meaningfully track how publishing and sharing practices for longform materials are changing over time.

• Extending Green OA mandates to longform outputs should be approached with caution. A rapid push in this direction, or one lacking in nuance, risks undermining the fragile progress made toward building sustainable Diamond and community-supported OA publishing models. Policymakers and funders should recognise that, without careful design, Green OA for longform materials could inadvertently weaken the business and community foundations now enabling fully open publishing.

• Cross-sector collaborative dialogue is essential. As the UK higher education sector navigates a period of acute financial constraint, it is vital that all stakeholders come together to explore sustainable approaches to longform OA. Bringing together universities, research funders, libraries, learned societies and other publishers, authors, and readers can help to identify the models that both strengthen scholarship and ensure equitable access to knowledge.

• Longform publishing is an international activity. The publishing model for monographs relies on international funding and is not sustainable without this. International collaboration is essential. Policy development offers a timely opportunity to reinforce the UK’s leadership position in SHAPE research and in academic publishing, and to maximise impact and return on investments. By aligning collective interests, it is possible to design policies and services that safeguard research quality, expand readership and engagement, and bolster economic resilience.