Celebrating Dr Michelle Addison: Associate Professor, Department of Sociology – International Open Access Week 2023

A post by Open Access Publications Officer, Katie Skellett

The theme of International Open Access Week 2023 is ‘Community over Commercialization’-spotlighting focus on supporting communities to seize the ‘opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems’.

As Open Access Publications Officer at the University, the announcement of this year’s theme made me wonder…how do our researchers relate to the idea of knowledge sharing systems when embarking on iterative research processes, and is this idea of ‘community control’ over emerging knowledge a part of our researchers’ consciousness? Certainly, within the Open Research Team we understand that community control can be a valuable form of protection for researchers against inequalities that exist in the academic publishing space. We also realise though that it’s our occupational ‘bread and butter’ to consider these things, and that, we aren’t, for the most part, engaged in day-to-day research processes that might distract from exploring inequalities in this arena.