Professor Lucy Montgomery, Professor of Knowledge Innovation, Centre for Culture and Technology shares her experience with Open Access:
“In 2021 our collaboratively authored book Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities was published as a fully OA book by MIT Press.
The publication of our book in a fully OA digital format, as well as in traditional paperback format, was the culmination of an exciting process of collaboration with MIT Press – which included open community peer review, traditional peer review, and eventual OA publication.
Our book makes a case for Open Access as a powerful mechanism for breaking down barriers to access and use of the knowledge made within universities. Given its topic, we felt that it was extremely important to work with a publisher to ensure that the book itself was OA.
Being able to share our work with anyone who is interested in it, regardless of whether they can afford to pay for a copy, has been a wonderful experience. We have particularly enjoyed being able to share a link to the full text version of the book via Twitter, as well as in emails to people who we hope will find the ideas valuable. The fact that people can access the book with a single click, without paywalls, means that we have been able to engage in a conversation with a community of readers in a way that would simply not have been possible if we had published our work as a closed book.”
