About the lecture
Over the past decade, the dissemination and publication of scholarly knowledge have undergone a profound transformation through Open Research – an approach that makes research outputs freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
The Open Research movement started more than two decades ago as a reaction to expensive journal subscriptions – the cost of which was rising exponentially at a time when the economy was shrinking.
What started as a focus on open access to journals has evolved to a much bigger ambition – to make all forms of scholarly knowledge such as raw data, methods and software code openly accessible.
Research and research-led innovation make a substantial contribution to the UK economy. The outputs produced by researchers here in the UK form a major part of our ‘intellectual heritage’ and contribute to science and scholarship globally.
As valuable assets – in both monetary and non-monetary terms – who are the custodians of these outputs and what are their responsibilities in ensuring they remain accessible in the long-term?
A key challenge for long-term accessibility is digital preservation. While large commercial publishers have the resources to outsource this responsibility to specialised preservation organisations, smaller scholar-led publishers, university presses and institutional repositories often lack the necessary funding or infrastructure.
Professor Fry’s inaugural lecture will discuss the risk to the UK’s ‘intellectual heritage’ in the context of digital preservation challenges and the research being done to create sustainable solutions.
About the lecturer
With an academic background in information science and a research career spanning the USA, Netherlands and the UK, Professor Jenny Fry’s work explores how scholarly communication, disciplinary cultures, digital knowledge infrastructures and publishing practices have transformed – and been transformed by – open research.
During the past two decades, she has led and contributed to numerous national and European projects on open access publishing, research data management and the policy frameworks underpinning open science.
Her publications and project findings have informed public debate about routes to achieving open access and contributed to policy development in the field. She collaborates with academics, publishers and library professionals from a range of organisations, both nationally and internationally.
Most recently, she has been part of the Loughborough team working on the collaborative COPIM and Open Book Futures projects, advancing research into the sustainable, long-term preservation of open access books. These initiatives aim to ensure that open scholarship remains discoverable, stable and preserved for future generations.
For further information on this lecture, please contact the Events team.
