“I want the work I am involved in to be discoverable and accessible to an audience beyond the Ivory Tower, Westminster and Whitehall”

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.

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Open Access Week 2022 – A Conversation with Jeremy Schmidt: Associate Professor, Department of Geography

A post by Katie Skellett, Open Access Publications Officer

What is Open Access Week? Open Access Week is a global event, aimed at promoting and informing the academic and research community about the benefits of open access. Open Access is the free & immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the granting of rights to share, use and re-use those results.

You can see other Open Access Week activity at Durham University by following our blog here

You can also find out more about Open Access at Durham University here.

Remember: any full text research publication you access from Durham Research Online, an author at Durham has made the effort to ensure that research is available for free to anyone, with the assistance of colleagues from Durham University Library and Collections, and departmental administrative staff across the University.

As some readers might already know, the theme of Open Access Week 2022 is ‘Open for Climate Justice’.

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Waving goodbye to REF 2021

Last week, staff in the Library waved off 12 boxes of books and other publications authored by current and former Durham staff as a final (for now) step in our university’s REF submission. This submission involved a huge commitment from staff across the university, across professional support and academic departments. Colleagues from across Durham University Library and Collections service have been involved in collecting publications, enabling open access and reviewing compliance with REF requirements, supporting Impact case studies and providing support for our poor academic colleagues tasked with drafting Research Environment statements.

Here we provide some brief figures to show some of the effort made to be able to wave off the final boxes one sunny morning last week…

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Foraging for theses

Recent headlines have highlighted concerns over unscrupulous third parties attempting to make money off the back of researchers by attempting to sell (for pennies) copies of Masters and Doctoral theses online. These have been taken from universities around the UK, including Durham University, and resold without permission (and often in breach of copyright). But for many years, Durham and other universities around the world have endeavoured to provide free access to theses, moving from what was previously rows of shelves of hard bound theses in our libraries, to digital repositories sharing the knowledge and expertise of our community online.

We often get asked by students, staff and others outside of the university if we have a specific theses available, or how to access theses and dissertations more generally, so we thought we’d highlight some of the resources available to you and why we make our theses available.

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#OpenAccessWeek2020: DRO is for book chapters too!

When we speak to colleagues about open access, often in short 5-10 minute briefings at Boards of Study, the focus is usually on ensuring open access to journal articles and conference papers. But a significant amount of research published at Durham comes in the form of long-from publications; books, monographs and chapters in edited volumes. In many cases we can make some or all of these open access as well. So let’s have a closer look…

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#OpenAccessWeek2020: A conversation with Professor Clare McGlynn QC (Hon)

International Open Access week is not only an opportunity to share the amazing open access research from Durham University and engaging with the wider open access community; it is also about getting to know our academics and the research process, helping us to understand a little bit more about the work that goes into the final article we download from the publisher’s site or repository. This year, we are so grateful to Professor Clare McGlynn QC (Hon) for taking the time to answer questions about her research.

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#OpenAccessWeek2020: Open Access articles and teaching

The current situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it the (even more) urgent need to provide online access to journal articles and books.  This is not always easy or possible to do via subscriptions, and it is certainly not always affordable.  It makes it more important than ever that we look to those high-quality resources that are openly available and consider how these can be utilised successfully for teaching purposes. 

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