Research

My research is guided by questions on the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production and scholarly communication. I am interested in the implications of the turn to openness in academic research: the drivers of this turn (economic, epistemic, ideological), the different values underpinning it, and the possibilities that different conceptions of openness offer to knowledge production across scholarly disciplines. I have published widely on topics relating to academic knowledge production in the sciences and humanities, such as peer review, open access publishing, open data and knowledge infrastructures.

My Ph.D thesis (‘Common Struggles: Policy-based vs. scholar-led approaches to open access in the humanities‘) explored the differing values of governmental mandates and academic-led open access initiatives. Through analysis of a range of source material including interview data, blog posts, policy consultations and secondary literature, I critiqued the UK government’s implementation of open access and illustrate how scholar-led presses offer a counterpoint through commons-based forms of publishing.

I am also engaged with ideas of the scholarly commons as a way of thinking through the radical possibilities of open access publishing, collaborative governance and shared infrastructures. My concept of the ‘care-full’ commons refers to a non-competitive and mutually-reliant approach to publishing grounded in an ethic of care, which I am fully exploring in a forthcoming monograph for the University of Michigan Press on the relationship between the commons and open access (working title: Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care and the Commons).

With my colleague Janneke Adema I help organise the Radical Open Access Collective, a heterogeneous community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other projects united by a commitment to diverse, non-competitive and experimental approaches to open access in the humanities and social sciences.