On university pressing and evidence pu(bli)shing: The view from a funder

Key points A total of 4% of REF2014 submissions were published by university presses. A total of 85% of all university press publications submitted for REF2014 were in the arts and humanities. A total of 97% of university press outputs funded by AHRC in REF2014 were in the UK and USA. Success can be found in the partnership between public investment and publisher support brokered by leading researchers.

• A total of 97% of university press outputs funded by AHRC in REF2014 were in the UK and USA.
• Success can be found in the partnership between public investment and publisher support brokered by leading researchers.

CONTEXT
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is one of the seven UK Research Councils. It has an annual budget of ca. £100 m and has over 30% of all research-active staff in the UKaccording to REF2014within its subject remit. Disciplines supported by the AHRC range from creative and performing arts to archaeology and linguistics, law, literature, languages, and heritage. Publishing is also one of the AHRC's research areas, and recent funding has been directed towards supporting a joint initiative with the British Library on the 'academic book of the future' (https://academicbookfuture.org/). For the last two years, in preparation for the UK Government Spending Review in 2015 and partly alongside its celebration of the tenth anniversary of its Royal Charter, the AHRC began to take a new look at the evidence sources and data available to support the arguments for investment in the arts and humanities as part of the wider science and research funding case. As part of that work, the AHRC was able to draw on its existing evidence sourcesfunding applications, grants awarded, narratives, and numeric information about the delivery and impact of AHRC researchwhich have previously been utilized in successive Impact Reports (AHRC, 2016). We also commissioned new pieces of research, such as the analysis by Deloitte on the economic, social, and cultural benefits of one AHRC scheme that has a specific emphasis on the 'follow-on' benefits arising from previous funding.
Building on the AHRC and other Research Councils' work in the development of Pathways to Impact as a core element in considering the wider social, cultural, and economic benefits of research projects since 2007, one of the richest and most timely sources of information on the benefits arising from AHRC funding over a more extended period of time was the impact case studies submitted by arts and humanities researchers to the REF2014 (the Research Evaluation Framework). Serendipitously, the 2014/2015 academic year was also the first reporting year for AHRC-funded research through the researchfish© system, which collects outputs and outcomes from all Research Councilfunded projects and which was combined with information previously collected by AHRC on research outputs and outcomes.
Looking across these multiple and different sources of information, AHRC staff were struck by the kinds of information that researchers were drawing on for these different data submissions. We discovered details about outputs and impacts of AHRC funding that could be charted and documented in the REF impact case studies, which researchers had not included in relation to the same grants in terms of research output submissions to the AHRC via researchfish©. The AHRC's Impact Report for 2014/ 2015 (AHRC, 2016) was able to provide different kinds of approaches to the evidence available, partly drawing on the REF2014 submissions but more often using this as the basis for new conversations with the researchers themselves to update, expand, clarify, and enhance their information to our own corporate case. In several cases, this information related to the kinds of publications-related data captured and collected by publishers, including university presses. university presses can make within the funding continuum. During the last few years, the relationship between funders and publishers has resulted in some tension, specifically in relation to debates about open access to research and new mandates on the position of researchers, universities, and publishers in relation to the publication process. What we want to suggest in this very brief article are the ways in which publishersand particularly university pressescan work with funders to give new consideration to the complementary roles these different bodies play in the enabling of UK's world-leading research environment. We see the different stages of our intervention in the research processthe funders as financial supporters and facilitators of the research activity itself, the publishers as not only the disseminators but post-research peer reviewers, quality arbiters, and communication leadersas a source for ongoing engagement. Specifically in the case of the AHRC, we are also a funder of research into the publishing landscape and its evolving business models, which then feeds back into policy and practice. In the context of the evidence pushing we as funders have been undertaking and the university pressing and publishing work of the university press, we would like to see a new engagement in our collective endeavour to make the case for excellence in arts and humanities research, the resources required for this, and the impacts and benefits it achieves. At a time when both funders and university presses are thinking about their roles afresh, there is a place for thinking about the touch points, overlaps, and differences in what we know, what we do, and how we deliver in support of researchers. This will require all participants to engage in more active reflection on evidence sources and their nuances, particularly the issue of shared and divergent terminologies, greater understanding of (and harmonization of?) publication meta-data, and shared approaches to alternative metrics and evidence measures.
For the AHRC, we see this as part of a new consideration of our role as more than just a funder. We are an enabler, a broker, and a facilitator and increasingly desire to be recognised as a knowledge-based organization. This is in line with the recommen-

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE PU(BLI)SHING AND THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESSES?
The first thing to note is that the information we are drawing on here comes with several caveats, including the relatively modest amount of data we have in hand and the time period we are considering. There are also caveats about the (in)consistent recording of publisher information by individual researchers when submitting to repositories. What we want to look at here is the data from REF2014 alongside information provided by AHRC's access to researchfish© submissions in November 2014 and March 2016.
Within the REF2014 submission, there were 7,149 outputs submitted (of a total of 191,150 submitted research outputs) that were published by a university press. Of the 7,149 university press outputs, a total of 6,084 were outputs in the arts and humanities. This means 85% of all university press publications submitted for assessment were in the subject areas covered by the arts and humanities domain. This is not unexpected given the prominence of monographs, editions, edited collections, and chapters from edited collections, which feature in arts and humanities disciplines, and the dominance of textbook university press publications in STEM disciplines, which would be less likely to be selected for REF outputs. The geographic range of those university presses submitted to the REF2014 is indicated in Table 1.
The dominance of the UK university press sector is clear and, combined with North America, represents over 97% of the total.
The balance here may be less UK-centric as for data capture purposes, a UK university press with a USA office but head-quarters in the UK would be listed as UK-based.
The In terms of the type of AHRC-funded output published by university presses, the evidence supports the report by Geoff Crossick (HEFCE, 2015) that the book remains dominant in its long form, chapter form, and edited form ( Table 2).
The journal article category is likely to be a significant underreporting of university press-owned journals; we believe authors are more likely to associate a journal with the journal name than with its publisher compared to the publisher of a book, collection, and so on. With respect to which university presses are involved in this process of dissemination, Table 3 contains information on the UK university presses that publish most AHRC-funded research based on the information within researchfish© sources.
The 'top' six university presses here are the same as the six highest from the REF, and Oxford and Cambridge university presses have the same positions. In terms of beyond the UK, those university presses recording six or more outputs that were AHRC-funded (all in the USA) are outlined in Table 4. Given the increasing diversity of university presses and the rise of new university presses established over recent years, it is also worth considering whether there are any trendslikely to be modestin the percentage share university presses have in relation to publication totals. This is where the information is most limited, however, in terms of trend identification. Based on the foundation date of a university press, the information tells us that publications recorded by AHRC-funded researchers in researchfish©, which were published in the period 2012-2015, is as stated in Table 5.

AN EXAMPLE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AND AHRC FUNDING
While the above information tells us about the broad role of university presses, both in the UK and internationally, in the dissemination of arts and humanities research and specifically that funded by the AHRC, it is just an overview. What we want to turn to now is a lookagain at a high levelof a single Comparison of university press outputs in arts and humanities between REF2014 and AHRC funding.

Number of AHRC-funded university press outputs in researchfish©
Percentage of AHRCfunded university press outputs in researchfish©  university press example. Given the numbers cited above, the most logical and varied snapshot is from Oxford University Press • The 108 OUP monographs, equally diverse in terms of subject spread, were written with support from AHRC funding to 106 awards, totalling~£16 million. This information acts as a useful reminder of the two sides of the research process, represented by the funder and the publisher, each supporting the research community in a different way. In the case of the AHRC as funder, that £16 m of public funding is largely invested in one of the prime resources for arts and humanities researchers: time. Using funding to enable researchers to engage in focussed periods of sustained research endeavour through both the research process and the writing up of that research is one of the key investments we make. When one couples this funding with the support from within the

University press
Number of AHRC-funded university press outputs within the UK  the projectlike so many othersrepresents a partnership between public investment (AHRC) and publisher support (OUP) brokered by leading researchers (the project team). All three of these groups of actors have an interest in continuing to scope, map, and account for the further influence of the project outputs in their various forms, and each plays a role in the potential reuse of that evidence in the case for further financial support for this research area, the wider field, and the arts and humanities more broadly.

CONCLUSION
As we outlined from the outset, this really is the beginning of a conversation. The materials we have looked at in this article, including the brief case study of OUP, indicate only the initial parameters of the discussion, but the information is currently limited in terms of information entered into the system and the time period over which we could consider trends or significant features. A more detailed look at the materials at the disciplinary range level, topics of research publications and the relation to research funding decisions, mightsubject to recognition of the time lags between research work and its output deliveryindicate new ways in which such sources of information could be brought together. The AHRC has begun work related to this in considering the role of publisher informationranging from publication details in the sphere of academic books through to journal keywordsin the context of a variety of other sources (REF environment statements; strategy documents from subject associations and learned societies) to see whether this might aid the development of the 'horizon questions' programme outlined in The Human World: The Arts and Humanities in Our Times -Strategy, 2013-2018(AHRC 2013, but this is very much early days. What is clear is that in academic publishing, and university pressing perhaps in particular, we have a mutually useful resource for considering the ways in which a funder like the AHRC can make the case for ongoing, increased investment in the research fields and researchers it, and the publisher, support.