Open research - the set of practices that enable us to increase our work's reach and impact by opening up research outputs and methodologies to a wider audience - is quickly gaining momentum in the Higher Education landscape. Our Annual Open Research Lecture provides an opportunity to think through some of these ideas and their underlying philosophies and politics, in an inclusive and collegial atmosphere.

This session will be held in-person, with a hybrid option also available. 

This year's lecture will be presented by:

Professor Stephen Pinfield

Professor of Information Services Management and Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI)

Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic and Participatory Openness

This presentation will explore some of the key conditions that are necessary to deliver global Open Access (OA) in a way that is effective and equitable.

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, OA has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. It has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation cultures and practices. Stephen Pinfield will engage with these issues, recognising that the global OA debate is now not just about publishing business models and academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know, and who gets to say. It will be argued that for OA to deliver its potential, it first needs to be associated with ‘epistemic openness’, a wider and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge. It also needs to be accompanied by ‘participatory openness’, enabling contributions to knowledge from more diverse communities.

The presentation will interact with relevant theory and current practice in order to discuss some of the challenges in implementing these different forms of openness, the relationships between them, and their limits. The presentation will be based on Stephen Pinfield's book, Achieving Global Open Access, published in mid-2024.

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