New draft REF2021 guidance was released for consultation on Monday morning. Buried half-way through this daunting 139 page document was an update to the REF Open Access policy. This revised policy comes on the back of Research England’s report Monitoring sector progress towards compliance with funder open access policies which was released in June, and on which we have already commented. From an Open Access perspective, additional flexibility for preprint servers has been added to the policy: The funding bodies recognise that many researchers derive value from sharing early versions of papers using a pre-print service. Institutions may submit pre-prints as eligible outputs to REF 2021 (see Annex K). Only…