Margot Finn and Richard Fisher

The Royal Historical Society (RHS) was founded in 1868. During its long history, the presidency of Peter Mandler (2012–16) has undoubtedly been one of the most consequential. Peter’s formal involvement with the Society began several years earlier, serving as Honorary Secretary from 1998 to 2002 and helping to drive through key reforms as the RHS began its long journey from a gentlemanly club of scholars to a properly professional and inclusive learned society, with a strong interest in the career experiences, and prospects, of UK academic historians. This Interlude argues that these so-called ‘Mandler reforms’ enhanced greatly the Society’s ability to function effectively in a challenging funding environment in which it also needed to respond to an ever-increasing range of changes in the agendas of government and associated funding bodies.

The proactive potential of the ‘modernising’ learned society was conspicuous at multiple levels during Peter’s tenure as RHS president, but is perhaps best captured by the 2015 publication of the Society’s first equalities report, Gender Equality and Historians in UK Higher Education: A Report by the Royal Historical Society.¹ With a foreword by Dame Jinty Nelson (the first woman RHS president, serving from 2001 to 2005), the report adopted a characteristically Mandlerian approach, combining social science and humanities methods of analysis.

It began with the fact that while History enjoyed a broadly equal gender balance at school and university level, academic staffing in the UK discipline was 60 per cent male and the professoriate only 20.8 per cent female. Drawing on a wide secondary literature and a survey that attracted 707 responses testifying to the state of play on the ground, the report was robust in its evidence base, forceful in its messaging and pragmatic in its recommendations and advice. Its core message that ‘Gender Equality is not just a problem for women’ (page 6) was carried forward into the field by Peter Mandler and his RHS colleagues at public events and workshops sponsored by the Society. Published Open Access (OA), the report offered colleagues a hard-hitting analysis calculated to inform and enhance equalities initiatives in a wide range of institutional settings.

As models and formats of scholarly communication had been seemingly so entrenched among historians for so long, perhaps more surprising was the emerging importance to the modernisation of the RHS’s working practices of publishing, and more specifically the advent of OA publishing models. Two distinct impulses, the democratic and the commercial, have always co-existed as drivers for OA scholarly communication, certainly as it has developed within the UK. Indeed to whom access should be open (whether readers, authors or organisations) has been and remains a very significant practical policy challenge.

UK OA had begun around the turn of the twenty-first century as a series of samizdat initiatives in (primarily) the biomedical sciences, growing significantly in traction over the next decade. When David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science in the Coalition Government (2010–14), decided that widespread OA could provide the necessary ‘steam’ to unleash British innovation, the die, at least in the UK, was cast: indeed the development of OA in the UK would be, to a degree then unprecedented in the global North, an act of state.

Willetts commissioned Dame Janet Finch to chair an enquiry into OA opportunities within the UK. Her extensive report appeared in 2012. Its original governmental motivation is often now overlooked, but the preamble to the Finch Report made the commercial imperative behind the UK OA policy agenda crystal-clear: ‘Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits. It will allow academics and businesses to develop and commercialise their research more easily and herald a new era of academic discovery.’²

The application of this mode of thinking about OA to all modes of British scholarly enquiry has proved, in practice, highly problematic. Historians, led initially in institutional terms by Peter Mandler as RHS president, have been vital in articulating an alternative and sometimes dissenting voice from outside the STEM disciplines, one which has caused both policy-makers and their institutional adherents occasional irritation.

This ‘dissent’ rarely stems from universalist objections to OA principles, but rather from a very strong belief that all policy pronouncements should be properly evidence-based. A firm evidential grounding has not, sadly, characterised all UK OA policy pronouncements, whether emanating from research funders and/or assessors or from some of their more vocal supporters within the burgeoning ‘scholarly communications’ industry. And for historians the generally acknowledged lack of international monographic data, whether of outputs or revenues or units sold, remains a major obstacle to proper policy formulation within the monographic domain.

This evidential lacuna was one of the biggest challenges facing those (of whom Peter Mandler was one, as was Richard Fisher) helping to advise the historian Geoffrey Crossick when he was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to write what remains far and away the most subtle and substantial monographic policy intervention of recent years, Monographs and Open Access (2015).³ The intellectual and technological issues raised in this report (not least around the experience of long-form reading on screen) remain highly pertinent and (sadly) largely unresolved, as reflected in Research England’s eleventh-hour withdrawal of its proposal to make REF2029 the first Research Excellence Framework exercise to mandate OA for some long-form works.

Crossick called for ambitious experiment, a call which did not fall on deaf ears. The RHS had always had a modest but enduring publication programme of its own, centred around its own Transactions and the extensive sequence of primary textual editions published under the Camden rubric (a series dating back to 1838). In 1975 the then RHS president Sir Geoffrey Elton agreed with his Cambridge colleague Derek Brewer to establish a new historical monograph series under the editorial control of the RHS at the nascent independent publisher Boydell and Brewer.

This series of Studies in History (SiH) published its first title in 1977, and ultimately this first tranche of RHS historical monographs ran to seventy-five volumes. In 1995 the series was relaunched, with additional editorial and financial inputs from both the Economic History Society and the Past and Present Society. This ‘New Series’ of monographs eventually encompassed well over 100 published volumes, with the final title appearing in 2020.⁴

However, SiH was no more immune to the general sales and pricing challenges confronting the publication of historical monographs than any other UK-based series, and in the context of the burgeoning disciplinary awareness of OA, it seemed to Peter Mandler and to several other members of the RHS’s governing Council that there was an opportunity for the Society to do something pioneering and important, transitioning the SiH series into something rather different. Thus New Historical Perspectives was born, a series aimed specifically at early-career researchers and designed to give them proper editorial mentoring throughout the entire publishing process. This series, undertaken in conjunction with the Institute of Historical Research and University of London Press, would be published OA from the outset, supported by funding from the Society’s own resources, and would include both single-author studies and some collaborative works. Its first title, The Family Firm by Edward Owens, was published in 2019.⁵

Inevitably this transition, and the surrounding change in publication arrangements, was not achieved without quite significant resistance from within the Society. In retrospect, however, the launch of New Historical Perspectives has been fully vindicated, both on its own terms as (still) one of the most important new OA monographic ventures to have launched in the UK in the past decade and as a totemic example of the RHS practising what it preaches, and doing something concrete which has helped to give the (many) RHS policy statements on OA that have followed markedly greater validity, and force. Indeed, New Historical Perspectives has helped cement history still further as the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences discipline which policy-makers tend to think of first when considering the implications of OA beyond STEM, a prominence to which Peter Mandler has contributed greatly.

The fact that at the time of writing the future of OA remains so unclear within the general framework of monographic publication in the UK, despite supportive policy pronouncements of many kinds, is partly a reflection of the very straitened circumstances in which so much British humanities research is now conducted. But it also reflects a broader approach to Open Access policy formulation which remains brutally state-specific, failing to understand the international context in which the outputs of (say) British historians have been consumed for the past half-century and more. Here too, however, the Mandler impress can be seen within the landscape of humanities organisations committed to supporting research and teaching at university level in these crucial disciplines. For, it was during his presidency of the RHS – and often in the UCL offices of that organisation –that the interdisciplinary members of the Arts & Humanities Alliance began to develop from the Arts and Humanities User Group A established in 2008. Unsurprisingly, its second chair, serving from 2012 to 2016, was none other than Professor Peter Mandler.⁶ There is more to be learned about this Alliance in the next interlude.