Part of the Oxford Forum of Open Scholarship 2025

Vive la révolution! Embedding control of research communication in academia

A shift from traditional publication of scholarly research findings to an open and equitable model has taken place over more than 25 years. A number of significant policies dramatically affected community practice. Despite this, research communication continues to be unduly influenced by commercial business models, and is therefore constrained. For a total revolution, control of research communication should be embedded where it belongs – within academia.

Pre & Post prints: Do we really need Gold?

When talking about open access with publishers you’d be forgiven for thinking that Gold open access was the only game in town. But providing access for free to everyone, was happening long before publishers decided to jump on the bandwagon. Pre-prints are standard in many fields and elsewhere, green open access (or the post-print) has become a way of complying with funder and REF open access mandates, and a way for researchers to make their near-final versions free without paying the publishers for it. So do we need gold publisher enabled access?

Supporting Open Arts, Humanities and Social Science Research at the University of Sheffield: Open Data and Beyond

Academic researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to make non-publication outputs FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) in order to support their sharing and onward reuse. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of practical guidance on how to achieve this in the context of specific output types and disciplines, especially in some areas of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS), where data sharing practices may be less embedded and outputs more diverse.