BERA has submitted its response to the current UKRI consultation on its proposed open access (OA) policy. The full response can be found below. As with previous open access interventions, BERA remains supportive of a policy that leads to more immediate OA publishing but believe this needs to be achieved by properly funding routes to Gold OA and allows this to be done within hybrid journals.

We are concerned that an overly proscriptive and under-funded approach to OA could severely the limit the routes to publication for educational researchers, particularly disadvantaging ECRs, school-based researchers and those from low and medium income countries. As a charity, BERA reinvests any income from our publishing in our charitable activities and remain concerned that an under-funded transition to OA would imperil the range of those which would limit the support we can provide the research community.

We argue that any transition to increased OA must ensure that funds are equitably available to researchers and that they sustain a high-quality publishing process that includes peer review, editing, production, dissemination and discoverability.

BERA has also contributed to the responses from the Academy of Social Sciences and the Society Publishers’ Coalition.