One of the most keenly attended sessions at the Royal Musical Association’s 150th Anniversary conference in London in September 2024 was the panel session ‘Publishing Musical Scholarship in the Age of Open Access’. The panel members were as follows:
Chair:
- Rebecca Herissone (Chair, RMA Publications Committee and University of Manchester)
Participants:
- Robert Adlington (Royal College of Music)
- Chris Banks (RMA Publications Committee Open Access Representative and Director of Library Services, Imperial College, London)
- Kate Brett (Cambridge University Press)
- Michael Middeke (Boydell & Brewer)
The session sought to demystify Open Access publishing, and to explore the changes, challenges and opportunities it presents for musical research, focusing on four key perspectives:
- Policies, particularly those applying to the UKRI and UK Research Excellence Framework
- Institutions, including both large universities with Music departments and smaller institutions such as conservatoires
- Researchers, including early-career researchers and independent scholars, who face particular challenges in negotiating OA
- Publishers specialising in scholarly outputs, whose funding models are being transformed by OA
The documents made available here summarise three of the presentations given during the session:
- ‘Open Access for RMA members’ (Rebecca Herissone) gives an overview of current OA policies relating to UK research, the changes to academic publication that result from these policies, options available to researchers, and the key terminology they need to understand those options and make appropriate choices.
- ‘Publishing Musical Scholarship in the Age of Open Access’ (Chris Banks) is a comprehensive account of the impact of OA from the perspective of the institutional librarian – in this case one heavily involved in national discussions about Open Access policy.
- ‘Open Access: A Publisher’s Viewpoint’ (Michael Middeke) addresses OA from the perspective of a small, specialist academic publisher.
We hope that these resources will prove useful to and informative for RMA members.