Matthew Sillence: Welcome back to PGR matters. In this episode,

we explore open access publishing, although possibly

the oldest and most recognizable form of open research practice,

as we've heard from Grant Young in episode one, there's also

great complexity facing researchers at this moment in

time,

The Green route tends to be the minimum requirement for academic

staff in higher education institutions in the UK.

Gold is much simpler. The publisher makes the work

available as open access, normally through the payment of

an article processing charge APC or book processing charge BPC.

The funds for these charges need to come from somewhere, and it's

often a funder or institution that covers them. Diamond access

involves a significant departure from the two routes just

mentioned in that it relies on a publishing model that does not

require the author to provide funds for open access, instead a

collective agreement between institutions or an in house

publisher, such as a university press, will either cover charges

or host the publication.

All this means that the researcher will need to do some

work to determine the best publication route. They'll also

need to think about what form of open access they're providing.

As we mentioned in our last episode, some research outputs

might be in a form that can be adapted or manipulated in some

way to create new data sets or artifacts. This is where Open

Access licensing comes in. The most prominent form of license

available is called Creative Commons. There are currently six

forms of CC license, and these range from the most permissive

CC BY to the more restrictive CC BY NC ND, the letters by simply

indicate 'by' so namely, the attribution to the creator of

the work. NC stands for non-commercial, and nd stands

for no derivative works. For example, although verbatim

copies of the work can be shared with others. It cannot be

altered or remixed. Another form of the license includes the

letters SA, which indicate share alike. This means that any

derivative work needs to be licensed under the same terms,

thereby maintaining the same level of permission.

To understand more about open access publishing and its

implications for books, which remain popular as a research

output in the arts, humanities and some areas of the social

sciences. I spoke to Sean Andersson, Open Access Fund

Coordinator at the University of Essex.

You've been very heavily involved in this, because I

really wouldn't be able to identify a lot of our

contributors and to be working with your colleagues at Essex if

it hadn't been for the brilliant promotional work that you've

done around the Open Access Fund at Essex and the outputs that

have been created. There's blog posts, there are videos on

there. There's all sorts of great stuff on the website.

So my first question, I suppose, is, what? Why is the promotion

of open access publishing been so important for for the

University of Essex, and also, I guess, for you by extension of

that?

Sean Andersson: Yeah, sure. Well,

thank you for your very kind words. Matthew, it's absolute

pleasure to be to be here and have the opportunity to talk

about it. It's quite a mission amongst our team open research

and open access. And University has a pretty strong open

research position statement,

and it is dedicated to enabling and sharing replication of our

research. And it boils down to phrase you probably heard quite

often, to be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. And

the team here that I joined a few years back really laid that

groundwork and passionately committed. I know you'll be

talking to them later.

I. And I am very fortunate to join that and to be able to add

my own enthusiasm for open access, because I've seen the

benefits from other angles. And it's great to be, great to be a

part of it. And it is really key. And of course, it's it's

key to any university, to a degree because of the ref

submissions. They're so important, I asked

Matthew Sillence: Sean what the routes into Open Access looked

like at the University of Essex.

Sean Andersson: We have the Essex repository, of course, and

self archiving, which we encourage. We had a blog post

just go live today on LinkedIn about that, just to reiterate

the basic steps that all our academics and PGR students can

take to benefit from that, to get their work out there, read

and publish agreements we still have course. They're still very

popular. Get a lot of use. Makes a really big difference,

especially in certain subject areas our computer studies and

science uses them extensively. Could I just

Matthew Sillence: ask you a bit more about read and publish?

Because it's something we've, we've we've covered a little bit

in our in the first episode of this. This three parter for the

for the podcast. But do you want to explain a little bit more

what how that works and what that sort of means to academics

and to institutions.

Sean Andersson: Yeah, of course, it's where we have an agreement

with a publisher which by which our academics are able to

publish their work open access, without direct charge to them,

and readers also have access to those journals if, for example,

there are a hybrid journal which is a mix of open and

subscription, and these read and publish agreements with

publishers can open up hundreds of journals, and our academics

can publish their work through the normal processes. You know,

as the standards are as high as anywhere else, there's no

difference there. But open access without having to face a

fee. There is a fee to be paid by the university. Of course,

it's a year or two year contract directly with the publisher, and

there are costs, of course, but it does facilitate and open up

lots of journals. And I think not long after I joined, I

totted up

journals, which is ambitious, but once I started, I had to

keep going, and it was well over two and a half thousand I think

we have at the time.

Matthew Sillence: Wonderful, fantastic. So, Lord, a lot of

work going on there. What Are there any other kinds of

approaches that you've you've taken?

Sean Andersson: Well, we have as everywhere else will we? Work as

a support for the Ukri open access. So where you where an

author has that funding, we facilitate that because it has

to come through us rather than the author, especially for long

form. So we do that we have, we promote and support as much

diamond publishing as we can so journals that are set up to be

open to read and open to publish as well. We have our rights

retention policy, of course, which we encourage authors to

use, which essentially puts their copyright onto the

author's accepted manuscript before it goes to print, and

that that's the version that we then upload to the repository,

and then which operates, really is the open access version of an

article. Even if that finished version of record is published

behind a paywall, the AAM can be shared. AAM can be shared and

used just just as any open access article

Matthew Sillence: through our conversation, Sean compared his

open access work to his background in more traditional

publishing.

Sean Andersson: Yeah, it was about 23 years altogether, and

it was a period of great change when I began, ebooks were

something on the horizon, but which never actually, actually

appeared because there wasn't an infrastructure, really.

Aggregators just didn't exist. The publishing industry was

waiting for aggregators to exist, and then when they came

along, everything changed, and print edition sales plummeted

and licenses got very expensive.

Print edition costs, which were already high when I joined. You

know, book was £40, which I thought staggering, and by the

time I left, an academic volume, 140

it. Article. Journals have it everywhere. Has it? It was

fabulous. It was really inspiring. After twenty,

however, many years of trying to sell super expensive books, it

was really game changing. For me. It was wonderful to do it,

and the response you get was terrific. Because a number of

times you get a very positive response to publication

announcement followed by, I don't have £80 or £100 and 120

and that just just went and suddenly you could share really

useful books with NGOs and charities and things who are

often very interested in a lot of these, especially in

something like African Studies. And they have no funds for for

books very limited. And it was brilliant for that,

Matthew Sillence: accessibility is really vital. So actually,

you know, doi that you've mentioned there is important.

The digital object identifier is really vital to that, so that

there is this single, stable reference point that that text

material can be, can be, can be accessed from the other the

other aspect of that, though, I suppose that's not quite the

whole story, is around discoverability of scholars

research. And this is something that's really intrigued me and

has impressed me a lot with the work you've been doing at Essex

is actually how you're contributing to making this open

access material more discoverable. Do you want to say

maybe a little bit about your approach to that at the

university at the moment?

Sean Andersson: Yeah, sure. Happy to I think from it's

essentially the problem that you have in any promotion or

marketing. So it was the same problem I had in in publishing.

Really, you've got one book, when a journal might have 200

books a month, and you've got to get something to their

attention. So I think it was, it's something I thoroughly

enjoy working on here. There's kind of a mission vibe to it

here at Essex, which is terrific, and it is a huge

problem, because there's massive amounts of information out

there. You know, everything's changed so much, and making

things discoverable is a job. So we do do as much as we can. And

I'd like to think I maybe put some of the things I used to do

here, so I mean, I can rattle through a few of them, and OA

generally provides many more opportunities than traditional

publishing, which relies really on marketing and discounts and

money Off offers and things like that, which is always a barrier.

20% discount of £130

book is a benefit to certain people, but not to that many.

and we share news of publication announcements. So we always have

a little plug, and we tag in as many people as you can tag their

publisher, for example. That's always really important. Keep it

relevant. You always got to keep it relevant. But if they're

related to it, you can tag them in that spreads the word. You

see, you see your posts spread widely, which is very

satisfying. But we also show a lot of news on there as well. We

tried to make it a go to so for events, for webinars,

development, say, for the UKRI long form, when that came in

last, last year, you've posted a lot of information about that so

that people knew about it, for example. So it's not just

announcements all the time, but it's always working to raise

awareness and to share specific details,

Matthew Sillence: fantastic,

range of communication there and promotion, and also really

focusing on that

authority of the author, I suppose, that you're talking

about there having them involved, whether they're, you

know,

on camera, talking about their work and their experience, or

whether that's through, you know, text on a blog post, or

through the social media channels that you've been

circulating, it's, I love what you were saying there, about it

being more about the communication, the announcement

or the sharing, and less about the pushing and the selling, I

suppose, which were, which is quite a step change, I think,

from from the price tags and pay walls that have sat behind a lot

of academic work for a very long time. Obviously this. The reason

we're recording this for the for the PGR Matters series is that

we're we tend to be focusing on postgraduate researchers and

some early career researchers. And maybe, to finish off our

conversation today,

maybe, do you have any suggestions on how best to

promote open access work. So how would say a research student,

for instance, or a very early career researcher coming quite

soon after their research degree might might get into this?

Sean Andersson: Yes, do what you do what you can locally. So get

your work onto the repository at your at your institution and

related subject repositories as well. Absolutely do as much as

you can like that. Join communities, groups, academic

societies, professional societies. You know, if you can

maintain your online research profiles, certainly, we really

encourage that. Have them, have them ready for when your

prodigious output of article starts flowing,

and use social media, which I know isn't first choice for a

lot of people, and a lot of people don't use it personally,

and you don't have to, but if you are willing to create, I

think, especially a LinkedIn, ResearchGate,

Bluesky, I think is pretty good.

if there's a newsworthy aspect to your work, can always ask

your university's media center to help you, and that was one

thing I would always be told by journalists. Review editors were

not always so encouraging, because they have so much, but

journalists are always desperate for material, and if it's

relevant and it's well presented,

there's a really good chance they can follow up on it, and

that can be excellent exposure, and it can do people a world of

good.

Matthew Sillence: Among those people who've benefited from the

open access fund at the University of Essex are Dr

Alison Barker and Dr Sean Seeger. Alison, who works within

the institution's library, completed a PhD and sought to

publish her research as a book. From your PhD, you've been able

to to literally codify what you've what you've been

studying, into a book. And I wonder if you, if you'd like to

tell us more about the publication, what you know what

it's, what it's really focusing on, maybe, you know, also, maybe

what inspired you to go for a book form because of, you know,

with a PhD, you can produce lots of different outputs from your

research, like journal articles, conference papers, etc. But, but

you know, what was it that really, really mattered around

this?

Alison Barker: I think for me, the structure was the most

important thing, because I'd I had

written the thesis around St George, how he is depicted in

art, and I wanted to focus on three different countries,

partly because of my language skills in those areas, and

partly because I had seen him in these different countries. And

it just fascinated me as to why he was there. So I picked

England, Italy and Germany, well, at least the Italian

peninsula and the German-speaking lands, because,

of course, there wasn't an Italy and there wasn't a Germany.

the way he looked. And I went with six iconographic

commonalities of, literally, if you look at an image, you think

that's St George. I know that's St George because he's got his

dragon and he's got his arm and he's got his lance and he's got

his flag with the Red Cross on. And those are the things that I

wanted to for my own interest, really. I wanted to see if I was

right in saying that he looks the same in all these places and

so and I did, and I found out that he does look basically the

same in these different countries and areas, but means

very different things to those different audiences. So I picked

three different regions, but I had four case studies in my

book. And the reason I had four rather than three was because I

wanted to not just have and this comes back to the structure that

I was talking about the beginning. I wanted to be able

to explore the comparisons between the areas the regions,

and not just do a chapter on England, a chapter on Italian

places and a chapter on German speaking places. So I mixed it

up and did some comparisons. So for example, going back to

Venice. Venice was my case study, and contrasted it with

Norwich. Because, yeah, because in our wonderful,

wonderful county of Norfolk, there are many towns and cities

that have St George as their patron saint and the Guild of St

George in Norwich. Compared, really interestingly, with the

Scuola that I was mentioning earlier in Venice, and their

patron saint being St George. And so I looked at the two

organizations, or corporate groups, really, and looked at

George as a

common identifying factor that unified the different people

within those groups. And, yeah, it's, I have to say, it's

fascinating. And I really think, because the thesis was huge, 500

images. Is with the book, I had to narrow down to 70 images

only, and what can come on to images. But writing the book, I

had to really think even more concisely about how St George

appears the same, but means different things to different

people. So one of my case studies is my my groups, my

guilds and a corporate group. And my other three case studies

were how St George was used by and received by artists, by

rulers, princes, and finally, by us lot, the common person going

on pilgrimage. And so, yeah, that's that's really how I

structured the book, and why the structure was so important.

Matthew Sillence: Why did you choose to go for an open access

publication, rather than, perhaps, the more you know,

traditional publishing routes, which would be, there would be a

price tag, basically, to get access to the, you know, a hard

bound or paper bound copy of the book, or a digital version of

the book.

Alison Barker: Yeah, it's a really good question. And

actually, before I published it, I was on the other end of open

access. I was on the other end of trying to find my research,

trying to read articles, trying to find information. And it

wasn't always straightforward. And I think because I as a

student, I was always looking for articles, and I failed

finding some. Some there was a price tag on, as you've said,

and I always avoided paying for it because I felt, I felt it was

unjust. Actually, that was one thing, but I also felt, well, I

couldn't afford it because I was a student, and so I tried to

avoid that, and I found lots of different ways, and one of the

ways was interlibrary loans. So I was part of University of

Essex when I was doing my PhD, and they have a system where you

can ask for an interlibrary loan, and it isn't just a book

being sent from a different library. They can do

interlibrary loans with articles, and that was a really

good way. But of course, I had access to that because I was a

student of the university, but if you're an independent

researcher, you can't do that, and so all of those doors are

closed to you. So when I approached Routledge and I sent

him my book proposal, and they wonderfully said yes. They then

asked me the question, would you like to publish open access? And

I was a bit stumped to start with, because I thought, well,

yes, definitely, I would love to. But why are you asking me?

Why aren't you just doing it? That was, that was my first

probable it was a question that came to me probably in my

ignorance, actually, but I thought they would make the

decision. So that was the first thing that I found quite

surprising. And and then when they asked me, and I said, Well,

yes, but I don't really know what it actually means for me as

an author, and I don't really know what it means for other

people trying to access it. I would love it to be freely

available. And so I had some lovely people at my own

university who were able to sort of talk me through some of it.

Routledge just said, Well, there's a fee to pay,

and it's a lot of money. It's £10,000 to pay for a book to be

open access. And I thought, Well, I haven't got £10,000. And

I said that to them, and they said, you can ask your

institution. So I did.

Matthew Sillence: You mentioned a moment ago, Alison, that you

felt that it was kind of unjust in a sense, that kind of process

of, you know, putting things behind a paywall or price tag or

and your own experience as a as a research student, and it did

you? Did you find that was a particular challenge in, say,

your your discipline, so within a sort of art historical

context, because not, not all of the people listening to this

will probably, you know, will be coming from it from, from an art

historic, historical point of view, but, but how does that

sort of manifest in a disciplinary sense, in terms of

accessibility? Yes, I think, I think you're right, and I think,

because that is my sort of my surrounding ambience, as it

were, art history is where

Alison Barker: I am, and where I look for things and where I

found barriers. However, I also have a friend who's doing her

PhD on vultures. It's South Africa.

It's completely new stuff. She comes up against the same thing.

Oh, wow. Okay, yeah, she's in a completely different discipline,

but still really struggling to find good quality, up to date,

accurate research that she can access freely. So I don't think

it's just one discipline or two disciplines. I think it's

probably across the board for people with art history, we have

our problems with images, and I think that is a whole kettle of

fish. That is probably just for art historians or people in a

visual discipline. Yes, yeah, that is a really big problem.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe that's a, you know,

another point we could, we could start on is, is this challenge

around images, and what I mean, broadly speaking, was what's

called third party copyright within, within a

Alison Barker: publication, I had a lovely email back from the

editor saying, we really would love to publish your book. It's

a great fit, but we don't think we can publish 500 images. In

fact, 70 is our limit. And I I just thought, of course, because

of that, would increase the cost of publishing and it would be

crazy. And so I was disappointed to start with, but I said, No,

no, that's fine. I can reduce it. So my first thing that I had

to do was to reduce my 500 images to 70. Not easy, but I

was able to incorporate into the text links to where people might

find the image themselves online. And also I wrote exactly

where they came from, so that somebody could follow it up

themselves without having the image in front of them. So what

I did methodically was they said, You've got to get image

permissions. So I decided, having decided which images I

was going to use. I roughly had 20, yeah, under 20 per chapter.

And I have, in my study, magnetic whiteboards all the way

around the room. I put all the images up on the board, and then

I would send a letter or an email to the copyright holder,

and I would have a system of red, amber, green, and then I

would be able to say where I was exactly at the moment with that

image. Now this process took a year and a half to get image

permissions. And it was a massive and it was probably the

most challenging thing about the book,

because having so I've got my whiteboard, I've got my color

system, it meant I could tell at a glance where I was, but I

would write to the owner of the image, normally in an

institution like the British Museum or the National Gallery,

and I would send my own pro forma that I'd written with my

request. Routledge had also created an Excel spreadsheet for

their records, but I filled this in as I went along, and it

included information about the owner of the copyright, I would

then say, Have I written to them or not? When I wrote to them, if

they'd replied, whether they required a fee, and then if I

had permission to use the image. But the pitfalls were, most

institutions would not use my pro forma, so because I'd asked

them to sign it, to give me permission, and they don't do it

like that,

Matthew Sillence: I asked Alison about the particular Creative

Commons License she has used for her book, which is CC BY NC ND.

Alison Barker: Yeah, they gave me a choice, actually, and

there's about six

else could take your work and then change it and make it into

something else. And I didn't want that to happen. So I wanted

this kind of license where this is my work. Please read it,

please use it for free, but please don't change it, because

it's my work, and that's how I want it to stay. So that's why I

went for this, for this particular license,

Matthew Sillence: Like Alison, Dr Sean Seeger, a senior

lecturer and Head of Department of Literature, Film and Theater

Studies, also published his latest book through the open

access fund. He describes the nature of the work his previous

experience of Open Access Journals and now with long form

publications.

Sean Seeger: The book is the product of work that goes back,

really, over the last 10 or so years, during which time I've

been thinking a lot about utopias and dystopias in

literature, primarily, but also in film, popular culture, and to

some extent, in social theory and kind of related areas. I

suppose that the broad kind of focus of my research during that

time has been on people who are interested in imagining

alternative kinds of society. So people who have tried to imagine

societies or worlds that are in some way an improvement on the

world that we live in, and also, on the other hand, people who

have had dystopian or darker or more apocalyptic visions of

things and everything in between. And the book is quite

wide ranging, as the title suggests so. Although it's

grounded in literary studies, which is where my primary

background is, it also engages with various kinds of popular

culture and what I'm calling utopian discourse, more

generally, which I find in all kinds of places, including in

the realm of self help, social and political theory,

contemporary cinema, blog posts and all kinds of other

materials. So it's it's utopia and utopianism in literature and

in lots of other areas as well. So how did you come to work with

your own university to make that work open access? What was the

process for you?

I'd had some previous experience with publishing via open access,

if memory serves, I'd published two journal articles in open

access format, so I did have some familiarity with it, and I

had had a very positive experience of that. So the

opportunity to publish those articles via Open Access

actually came from the journals in question. I think they were

promoting open access at the time, and they'd receive funding

from elsewhere.

And I certainly noticed that those Open Access articles had

been quite widely read, and they'd been downloaded, and

they'd been read by graduate students, and they were

mentioned to me at a number of conferences and other other kind

of events I attended. So I had the perception that open access

material is being more widely read than work that's behind

various kinds of pay walls. And then the library at Essex had

promoted open access, I think, at a number of events I'd

attended, so it was on my radar.

And as I neared the end of completing work on the

monograph,

I decided to approach the library and cultural services

team about this. They had experience of working with the

publisher, Peter Lang that I was publishing with, and they

immediately got in touch with them. So I was delighted by that

response, and it was all a lot more straightforward than I'd

expected.

Matthew Sillence: Was, was Peter Lang, sort of a publisher that

you were, that you had on your radar already, that you'd sort

of maybe published works of a similar area or kind of field?

Sean Seeger: Yes, they were very much on my radar. With my first

book, which was adapted from my PhD thesis, I had a number of

publishers in mind, and I approached various publishers

over the course of a year or so, and I settled on Routledge in

the end, who had a series where I think it fitted very well. But

in the case of this book, utopian variations I'd always

intended to publish with Peter Lang, because they have a book

series in utopian studies, which is published in association with

a research center based in Ireland called the Ralahine

Utopian Studies Center. And.

And they have published the majority of the major texts in

the subfield of utopian studies. And they had a, again, a

particular series where I felt that my, my current research

really suited very kind of directly. So I'd always had

Peter, Peter Lang's utopian studies series in mind. When I

approached them about the open access fund, again, they were

very receptive to that. It's something they've done before.

And on the Ralahine website, they have a kind of very handy

way of filtering and searching for open access texts. So it's

kind of has it has an unlock sort of symbol next to it to

show which ones were open access. So I knew that they'd

done this before, and I'd downloaded some of their open

access publications and used those in my own research as

well, and I knew that was the destination for this publication

all along.

Matthew Sillence: Were there any particular challenges when it

came to say, licensing third party content from from film and

literature, you know, maybe smaller kind of quotations and

things are maybe not, not so much of an issue for most

scholars, but I suppose extended pieces or or photographs or

other kinds of works that you might need permission from. How

does that? How does that work with an open access publication?

Sean Seeger: Yeah, that's a good question. So in my first book, a

lesson that I had learned when it came to copyrighted material

was that there is a very significant difference between

quoting poetry and quoting from prose texts. And unfortunately,

in my first publication, I had to cite poetry quite a quite a

lot, and that meant going in search of permissions from a

number of publishers, which substantially delayed the

publication process. I think, I think I was well over a year

getting permissions for some copyrighted material, and only

toward the end of that process discovered I had to get the same

permissions in the United States context as well. So there were

additional permissions, and it was very protracted. But quoting

from prose sources, of course, is very different, and you're

able to quote a much more substantial extract before you

have to go and search for permissions. So in the case of

this text, in the case of utopian variations, I didn't

have to seek out permission for copyrighted material because all

of the extracts were comparatively short. And in the

case of the visual texts, what I've what I've tended to go in

for, and this has to do with my style of analysis is detailed

descriptions of particular visuals followed by my analysis

rather than reproducing images. That just has to do with my kind

of method and my preferred approach. Because I think that

there's actually a lot of critical significance in the act

of description itself, and I think there's a lot of value to

that. So in the case of this project, I didn't need to get

permission for still images or for reproducing pictures of

advertisements or anything of that sort. If it had been a

different sort of project, yes, I would have reproduced posters

and other things and then and discussed those. But as it

happened, on this occasion, I've gone for detailed descriptions

instead, I'm quite interested in, again, cultural discourses,

so discourses that cross different media and mediums and

historical periods and so on. And they're not necessarily

confined to just one genre or form or medium. It could, it

could kind of cross all sorts of different cultural forms. And

that's partly why the project had to be somewhat broader than

just literary studies, because these are things that are, that

are out there across society and culture, and they show up in all

kinds of places.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah, and a very and a very great rationale

for for open access, I guess that you know the you're not,

you're not closing this off or putting it behind a pay wall

that is only going to be focused on, perhaps by a, you know, a

smaller group of scholars, but actually potentially making that

widely, freely available to to any number of scholars across

different different disciplines to draw on.

Sean Seeger: I think that's yes, I think that's a real benefit in

the case of this project, open access seems like a particularly

suitable route, given that, again, if memory serves, there

are eight chapters to the book, and those chapters cover a very

wide range of subjects. And I'd like to think they would be of

interest to people across the arts, the humanities and to

stump, to some extent, the social sciences as well. So if

this book is out there online, and it's visible and it's

accessible to anyone, in principle, with an internet

connection, hopefully there'll be something there, even if it's

just a chapter or a section or subsection of the book, which

will be of interest to a quite broad audience. So yeah, in

terms of.

Open Access, I think that's very beneficial.

Matthew Sillence: As we've heard from these interviews, open

access publishing has tremendous benefits for researchers. As we

discovered in episode one, there's a greater potential for

scholarly work to be more widely consulted and cited by students

and academic staff alike. There are also clear advantages for

reaching groups such as non governmental organizations and

in crossing disciplinary boundaries. Sean Seeger's point

about interdisciplinarity might resonate with some of our

listeners. There are some points to consider, however, Alison's

reflections on third party copyright would apply for any

traditional book that reproduced images, but it's important to

note the terms under which the publication will be released, in

this case, under a Creative Commons license. This needs to

be made clear to each individual or organization that's granting

permission to reproduce their material, having a system for

tracking this information, I think, can be easily translated

to the electronic publication of a thesis for a research degree

or a journal article, as Sean Andersson and Sean Seeger's

contributions show, it's crucial to secure advice from your

university about available funds for open access and the kinds of

publishers to approach this ensures that the content of the

Work aligns well with existing titles and fields of

scholarship, a final point which I'll end on is Sean Andersson's

comments about promotion. Making a work Open Access removes many

barriers to potential readers or users of research outputs, but

researchers need to employ a large range of features and

tools in the open research ecosystem to really make their

work known to others, word of mouth, digital object

identifiers, or do eyes sharing information and links to the

work through social media platforms, blog posts and even

short form videos of authors discussing their work can help

to raise awareness of what has been produced and its value for

different communities within and beyond academia.

That's it for our second episode. Next time on PGR

matters, we'll return to the issue of developing engagement

with open research by talking to Dr Samuel Moore, the lead

researcher on the morphs project, and we take a deep dive

into the world of gamification and discussion with Hannah Crago

from the University of Essex, whose recent experience of

research focused learning activities lays the foundations

for an upcoming training program for postgraduate researchers.