To mark this year’s Open Access Week (20-26 October), the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar exploring this year’s theme: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

Facilitated by Bibliometrics Support Officer Andrew Gray, a panel of four speakers from different areas of UCL offered their time and expertise to consider this complex question.

• Lauren Cantos is the Research Integrity and Assurance Officer in the Compliance and Assurance team. Previously she worked in the Research Ethics team at UCL, and her background is as a Humanities and English researcher.
• Christine Daoutis is the UCL copyright support officer, based in the library. Her background is in open access, open science and copyright, particularly the ways copyright interacts with open practices.
• Catherine Sharp is Head of Open Access Services in Library Services [or LCCOS]. She manages the Open Access Team, which delivers Gold open access, including transformative agreements, and Green open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Discovery, for UCL staff and students.
• Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at UCL department of Geography. He founded and co-direct the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group. He is an expert in citizen science and contributed to the US Association for Advancing Participatory Science (formerly the Citizen Science Association), and the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

The webinar began with a short reflection on the theme from each of the panellists, followed by a discussion structured around these questions:

1. What does “ownership” mean for research – for outputs and for data? And when we define what “ownership” means, how do we decide who the owners are – or who they should be?
2. We often think of ownership as linked to “authorship”. A wide range of people contribute to research – including many outside academia – but not all become named as authors. How do we recognise them?
3. What happens when copyright (or other IP rights) conflict with academic expectations around ownership and authorship?
4. How is the production and the dissemination of research influenced by commercial considerations around ownership and access?

It was a thought-provoking discussion in which the panellists touched on a wide range of subjects, including considerations of attribution beginning at the outset of a project, recognising contribution from individuals outside of academic structures, understanding copyright concerns when having work published and how UCL’s updated Publications Policy can help with this. As well as answering questions, the session raised other questions and, as is often the case, the complexity of these questions didn’t allow for straightforward answers. As Andrew aptly put it towards the end of the webinar – ‘sometimes saying the question is complicated is an answer in itself’. This particularly resonated with regard to the issue of AI tools failing to attribute authors, and also the matter of widening participation within the production of knowledge.

If this has piqued your interest, or you attended the webinar and would like a recap, you can watch the full recording now:

 

Access the full recording on MediaCentral

Useful Links

A selection of useful resources were shared in the webinar chat:

• The Authorship Integrity Toolkit from UK Research Integrity Office
• UCL’s updated Publications Policy
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Understanding how copyright can shape the discourse around open scholarship’ – blog post by Christine Daoutis
• Managing intellectual property rights in Citizen Science by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• Typology of Citizen Science projects from an intellectual property perspective by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Retaining author’s rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy’ – blog post by Catherine Sharp
• EIFL Rights Retention and Secondary Publication Rights
• Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Open Science at the generative AI turn: An exploratory analysis of challenges and opportunities | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
• Copyright considerations in text and data mining: sharing and adopting best practice – UCL Library Skills training session
• “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
• Join UCL Copyright Literacy Community on MS Teams

We are very grateful to the speakers who contributed a lot of insight and provided much to reflect on from this webinar. We hope the conversation around these questions will continue and answers will develop as we navigate the complexities.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

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Each year during Open Access Week, we like to share an update about what’s been happening in the past year across the various teams supporting Open Science and Scholarship at UCL and beyond.

This year, the Office for Open Science & Scholarship and UCL Press partnered with colleagues at The London School of Economics and The Francis Crick Institute to launch an inaugural London-based Open Science Festival, instead of our usual annual conference. Taking place from 2nd – 6th June, there were a range of online sessions, as well as in-person sessions hosted at UCL and LSE, covering subjects such as Authorship and AI, Open Access in an Age of Populism, and Creativity in Research and Engagement.

Browse the full programme, read write-ups and watch recordings in this summary blog post.

We are delighted to share that planning has already begun for next year’s festival, with more London institutions joining to put together a programme with even wider reach. Watch this space!

Back in November 2024, the Office for Open Science and Scholarship fully committed to Bluesky, where our activity and following has increased over the last 12 months. From just over 200 followers at the end of October 2024, to a current total of 1,762 followers, it is fantastic to connect with a wide community engaging with Open Science. Our LinkedIn audience has also grown from 600 followers to over 1000, and it has been great to see more UCL students and staff engaging with our content on there.

Find us on LinkedIn and Bluesky if you’ve not connected with us yet!

Open Access

Over the past 12 months, the Open Access Team has facilitated the Gold open access publication of over 3,500 papers across 40 transformative agreements with publishers. UCL Discovery has continued to go from strength to strength, with over 62 million downloads, reaching the 60 million milestone in July which we celebrated in this dedicated blog post. The publications repository now boasts over 196,000 open access items, including 26,100 theses, with over 11,500 uploads over the last year.

Find out more about UCL’s Research Publications Service and how to make your publications open access.

UCL Press

This summer, UCL Press celebrated its 10th anniversary! To mark this significant milestone, an open access monograph panel event took place in person and online on 10th June, featuring speakers from universities and the publishing sector. UCL Press was launched in line with UCL’s commitment to open science and scholarship, and as the UK’s first fully open access university press, has to date published 423 books and 15 journals, surpassed 26 million open access downloads, and reached 242 countries and territories.

Discover how to publish your book, journal or journal article with UCL Press.

Copyright

It has been a busy year for the Copyright Team. In 2024-2025 we ran 36 sessions for UCL students and staff on a range of topics, including copyright for theses, publications, data, images, publishing contracts, and GenAI, continuing this year with a similar programme and offering bespoke sessions, too.

New resources included our Copyright and AI Libguide, our Getting Started with Copyright webpage, and the launch of our Copyright for Humans game: an engaging, playful and critical approach to copyright, which can be played in person or online.

As the new mascot, Colin the Copyright Literacy Nerd, will tell you, copyright education is much more than knowing about what the Copyright Act says or what a licence allows you to do. In April we launched the UCL Copyright Literacy Strategy 2024-2027, which sets out a vision and a plan of action to develop copyright confidence and understanding across UCL. One outcome of the strategy is our growing Copyright Literacy Community, which offers UCL staff and students opportunities to discuss copyright issues, share questions and best practice, and participate in collaborative projects.

For more information, contact the copyright team.

Citizen Science

This year marked a major milestone for Citizen Science at UCL, with our first community event bringing together UCL staff and students to exchange ideas and explore participatory research.  In addition, we expanded our UCL Citizen Science Community on MS Teams to over 120 members and introduced the UCL Citizen Science Support Resources Hub, a collection of articles, tools, and guidance on different aspects of citizen science projects. The Office continues to support new UCL Citizen Science Academy training programmes leading to the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, ensuring consistently high standards across different cohorts. We have also very recently set up a UK-wide Citizen Science Enablers Network, a new initiative supporting groups and individuals interested in enabling Citizen Science at their own higher education institutions.

We’re committed to developing our support service for Citizen Science at UCL – one that empowers staff and students to run impactful projects and strengthens UCL’s position in Citizen Science.

Join our community and talk to us about your ideas and projects!

Research Data Management

In the world of Research Data Management at UCL, the past year has been significant as the Research Data Repository surpassed the 1 million mark for both views and downloads, with the figures currently 1.3 million for views and 1.2 million for downloads. A fantastic achievement from the UCL Research Community. These views and downloads took place in over 190 countries and territories across the world, which demonstrates the wide-reaching impact of the Research Data Repository. There is currently an impressive total of over 1000 items published on the repository which we hope will continue to increase, along with the total views and downloads.

Find out more in the newly published RDR user guide.

The UCL DMP template has also been updated this year, and you can find more information on managing your research data across the research lifecycle on our webpages.

Bibliometrics

The Bibliometrics team ran a full calendar of 12 scheduled training sessions in the Library Skills program as well as a large number of smaller individual sessions, including developing training and support for new tools such as OpenAlex and emerging citation analysis tools. A major theme this year was advising on using the new Overton service, which offers researchers a way to discover grey literature as well as to identify new impacts of their research. We also assisted a wide range of teams at UCL in their work to measure and report on UCL’s research activity and impact.

It’s been a fantastic year, and we’re looking forward to what the next one has in store – read along on this blog, sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky to keep up to date!

 

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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Guest post by Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator, and Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer

This year’s theme for International Open Access Week 2025, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, asks us to reflect on how knowledge is created, shared, and controlled, and whose voices are included in that process. It’s a question that aligns closely with UCL’s approach to citizen science, which promotes openness, collaboration and equity in research.

Citizen science provides a powerful lens to examine how knowledge is co-produced with communities. It recognises that valuable knowledge comes not only from academic institutions but also but also from lived experience, community knowledge, and shared exploration.

Through initiatives like the UCL Citizen Science Academy and UCL Citizen Science Certificate, we support researchers and project leads to work in partnership with the public, enabling people from all backgrounds to take part in research that matters to them. These programmes are designed to be inclusive and hands-on, helping to build confidence, skills and shared responsibility.

For those of us working in academia, this theme reminds us that open access isn’t just about making papers free to read – it’s about changing how research is produced. Involving citizen scientists in forming research questions, collecting data, and interpreting findings opens up the research process itself, not just access to its outputs.

The Principles for Citizen Science at UCL emphasise respectful partnerships, transparency, and fair recognition. They reflect our belief that citizen scientists are co-creators whose insights – rooted in everyday experience and local knowledge – bring depth and relevance to academic work.

In particular, the fifth principle for Citizen Science at UCL states that CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance should be considered when working with marginalised communities and Indigenous groups. These principles are: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics, which remind researchers that creating knowledge from Indigenous data must be to the benefit of Indigenous Peoples, nations and communities. These Principles support Indigenous Peoples in establishing more control over their data and its use in research. The Research Data Management Team encourage staff and students to engage with the CARE Principles in addition to the FAIR principles.

So, who owns our knowledge? At UCL, we believe the answer should be: everyone. Through citizen science and its principles, we’re building a future where knowledge is created collectively, shared responsibly and made openly accessible – because it belongs to the communities that help shape it.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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As we conclude International Open Access Week, we have been inspired by a wealth of discussions and events across UCL! This week, we have explored balancing collaboration and commercialisation, highlighted the work of Citizen Science initiatives, discussed the role of open access textbooks in education, and addressed key copyright challenges in the age of AI to ensure free and open access to knowledge.

Today, we are excited to introduce the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. This new document, shaped through a co-creation workshop and community consultation, provides guidance on equitable authorship practices and aims to foster more inclusive and transparent research collaboration across UCL.

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The team at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship is pleased to launch the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. These principles have been built up from a co-creation workshop and developed in consultation with our academic community and are now available for wider use, linked from our website.

In August 2023, the OOSS Team posted a discussion about the challenges of equity in authorship and the co-production workshop held during that year’s Open Science & Scholarship Conference. We outlined some preliminary considerations that led to the workshop, summarised the discussion and emerging themes, including the need to more widely acknowledge contributions to research outputs, the power dynamics involved in authorship decisions, and ways to make academic language and terminology accessible for contributors outside the academic ‘bubble’.

The outcomes of the workshop were then used as the basis for developing the new Statement of Principles of Authorship. This document provides general advice, recommendations and requirements for authors, designed to complement the UCL Code of Conduct for Research and align with existing published frameworks, such as the Technicians Commitment or CRediT. The document outlines four core principles and a variety of applications for their use across the broad range of subject areas and output types that are produced across the institution. It also proposes standards for affiliations and equitable representation of contributors.

While it is true that academic publishing is a complex and changing environment, these principles are intended as a touchstone for discussions around authorship rather than explicit expectations or policy. They can guide decision making, help understand how affiliations should be presented for best consistency and traceability in the long term, and empower people to request inclusion or make plans to include citizen scientists or other types of collaborators to their work.

We look forward to hearing the many ways that these principles can be used by the community!

For a full overview of our #OAWeek 2024 posts, visit our blog series page. To learn more about the Principles of Authorship and stay updated on open science initiatives across UCL, sign up for our mailing list.

 

We are approaching the end of International Open Access Week, and we have been enjoying a series of interesting insights and discussions across UCL!  Earlier this week, we explored the balance between collaboration and commercialisation, highlighted the important work of Citizen Science initiatives and the growing significance of open access textbooks.

Today, Christine Daoutis, UCL Copyright Support Officer, will build on our ongoing series about copyright and open science, focusing on how we can ensure free and open access to knowledge in the age of AI, by addressing copyright challenges, advocating for rights retention policies, and discussing secondary publication rights that benefit both researchers and the public.

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Open Access Week 2024 builds on last year’s theme, Community over Commercialisation, aiming not only to continue discussions but to take meaningful action that prioritises the interests of the scholarly community and the public. This post focuses on copyright-related issues that, when addressed by both individual researchers and through institutional, funder, and legal reforms, can help create more sustainable and equitable access to knowledge.

Retaining author rights

Broadly speaking, rights retention means that authors of scholarly publications avoid the traditional practice of signing away their rights to publishers, typically done through a copyright transfer agreement or exclusive licence. Instead, as an author, you retain at least some rights that allow you to share and reuse your own research as openly as possible. For example, you could post your work in an open access repository, share it on academic networks, reuse it in your teaching, and incorporate it into other works like your thesis.

Many funders and institutions have specific rights retention policies that address related legal issues. If such a policy applies, and publishers are informed in advance, authors typically need to retain rights and apply an open licence (usually CC BY) to the accepted manuscript at the point of submission.

Rights retention ensures that your research can be made open access without relying on unsustainable pay-to-publish models, and without facing delays or restrictions from publishers’ web posting policies. Importantly, rights retention is not limited to published research—it can be applied to preprints, data, protocols, and other outputs throughout the research process.

Secondary Publication Rights (SPRs)

Secondary publication rights (SPRs) refer to legislation that allows publicly funded research to be published in an open access repository or elsewhere, at the same time as its primary publication in academic journals. Some European countries already have SPRs, as highlighted by the Knowledge Rights 21 study conducted by LIBER, and LIBER advocates for #ZeroEmbargo on publicly funded scientific publications. There are ongoing calls to harmonise and optimise these rights across countries, ensuring that the version of record becomes immediately available upon publication, overriding contractual restrictions imposed by publishers.

SPRs can apply to different types of research output and are meant to complement rights retention policies. However, introducing SPRs depends on copyright reform, which is not an action individual researchers can take themselves, though it’s still useful to be aware of developments in this area.

Artificial Intelligence and your rights

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) has introduced broader issues affecting researchers, both as users and as authors of copyrighted works. These include:

• Clauses in subscription agreements that seek to prevent researchers from using resources their institution has subscribed to for AI-related purposes.
• Publishers forming agreements with AI companies to share content from journal articles and books for AI training purposes, often without clear communication to authors. A recent deal between Taylor & Francis and Microsoft for $10 million has raised concerns among scholars about how their research will be used by AI tools. In some cases, authors are given the option to opt in, as seen with Cambridge Press.
• For works already licensed for reuse, such as articles under a CC BY licence or those used under copyright exceptions, questions arise about how the work will be reused, for what purposes, and how it will be attributed.

While including published research in AI training should help improve the accuracy of models and reduce bias, researchers should have enough information to understand and decide how their work is reused. Creative Commons is exploring ‘preference signals’ for authors of CC-licensed works to address this issue.

The key issue is that transferring your copyright or exclusive rights to a publisher restricts what you can do with your own work and allows the publisher to reuse your work in ways beyond your control, including training AI models.

Using Copyright exceptions in research

UK copyright law includes exceptions (known as ‘permitted acts’) for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review, quotation, and illustration for instruction. As a researcher, you can rely on these exceptions as long as your use qualifies as ‘fair dealing’, as previously discussed in a blog post during Fair Dealing Week. Text and data mining for non-commercial research is also covered by an exception, allowing researchers to download and analyse large amounts of data to which they have lawful access.

Relying on copyright exceptions involves evaluating your purpose and, for some exceptions, making a decision around what is ‘fair’. This also involves some assessment of risk. Understanding copyright exceptions helps you exercise your rights as users of knowledge and make confident assessments as to whether and when a copyright exception is likely to apply, and when permission is necessary. [see links for UK legislation at the end of this article]

Engage with copyright at UCL

The conversations sparked during Open Access Week continue throughout the year at UCL as part of ongoing copyright support and education. To engage further with these issues, you can:

• Add your voice to how copyright literacy is shaped at UCL. Provide feedback on the draft UCL copyright literacy strategy and consider joining the new UCL copyright literacy community.
• Attend a copyright training session or email copyright@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a bespoke session. The newly introduced ‘Copyright, Open Science and Creativity’ game is a fun way of engaging with current debates and learning about recent developments. More dates for this will be released soon.
• Follow copyright news on the Open@UCL blog and the Copyright blog.

Useful Legislation

• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 29: Research and Private Study
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 29A: Text and Data Mining for Non-Commercial Research
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 30: Text and Data Mining
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 32: Copying for non-commercial research

As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, it’s inspiring to see how open access is shaping research and collaboration across UCL! Earlier this week, we explored the balance between collaboration and commercialisation, and highlighted the important work of Citizen Science initiatives.

Midway through the week, Dhara Snowden, Textbook Programme Manager at UCL Press, shares her insights below on the growing significance of open access textbooks and their role in the broader landscape of open access publishing.

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UCL Press is the UK’s first, and largest, fully open access university press. We have been publishing books and journals for almost ten years, covering a wide range of subjects and formats. In 2021, the press launched a new programme focusing on open access (OA) textbooks. I joined at that time, and over the past three years, I’ve been responsible for managing our progress in this area. As part of this year’s International Open Access Week, I wanted to share some of our thinking and planning around this activity and offer some musings about OA textbook publishing in general and what the future holds.

What are Open Access Textbooks?

Firstly, it’s useful to clarify what we mean by “textbooks.” Through conversations with academics across faculties, I’ve realised this term can mean different things depending on the context and level of study. In the broadest sense, a textbook is a resource that supports the delivery of a course or module. Textbooks can provide a wide-view survey of a field or subject, to be “adopted” as the main guide for study, or they can be part of a reading list that includes chapters from various sources, like journal articles.

Although textbooks were traditionally published in print, there has been increasing demand for digital versions of commercial textbooks, which can be purchased by individuals and licenced to institutions for use for multiple users.

Open access publishing, meanwhile, involves making scholarly content freely available online, removing subscription or purchase barriers. In the context of textbooks, this means students and educators can access high-quality educational resources without significant costs. OA textbooks are typically published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, which allows for redistribution, adaptation, and modification, promoting a collaborative and inclusive educational environment.

The creation and uptake of OA textbooks has seen a sharp increase in recent years, particularly in the US and UK, with non-profit-funded publishers like OpenStax, collaboratively funded projects like CORE Econ, and platforms like Pressbooks. The Open Textbook Library, supported by Open Education Network, currently indexes 1,542 published open textbooks.

Why do we create them?

The UCL Press textbook programme was set up in direct response to issues around pricing for institutional access to essential e-textbooks, which were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The current ecosystem presents an unstable and unsustainable financial model for institutional libraries, as well documented by the eBooks SOS campaign, which calls attention to the lack of regulation in pricing by commercial publishers.

An article published by Insights in 2022, ‘Perspectives on e-books and digital textbooks and the way ahead’, claims that ‘combined spending on book across nationally negotiated library purchasing frameworks increased from £55M in 2019/20 to £73M in 202/21, with e-textbook provision increasing by 281% to £25.1M during that time’.

In addition to concerns about affordability and sustained access, the Insights article outlines that post-pandemic, “shifts in teaching practice are accelerating demand for features that enhance blended learning”, with more flexibility and adaptability in resources being required, which isn’t being delivered by traditional academic publishing.

UCL Press’s aims to disrupt the current academic publishing ecosystem, offering authors and readers an alternative to the commercial model. This connects the theme for OA Week 2024, which calls for community over commercialisation. Bringing publishing back to the hands of academy, we can provide sustainable and high-quality textbooks to facilitate hybrid teaching and remove barriers to access for our content thereby reaching the widest possible audience and increasing chances to impact in scholarly communities.

How do we create them?

The UCL Press textbook programme commissions and publishes textbooks for undergraduate and postgraduate students across a wide range of subjects and topics. Every new proposal (and final manuscript) undergoes a rigorous peer-review process to ensure high-quality and relevant content.

Our approach is to collaborate with lecturers to create resources that provide high-quality guidance for students. Taking a personal and flexible approach to each project, we avoid rigid templates or a one-size-fits-all mentality, tailoring our textbooks to the needs of students and subject matter.

To date, we’ve published two textbooks. The first, An Introduction to Waste Management and Circular Economy, came out in December 2023. This textbook supports a module taught at UCL but also has global relevance for courses in environmental engineering, resource efficiency, bioenergy, and waste-to-energy technologies.

More recently, we published  Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies, an edited collection exploring the disciplinary debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations that shape contemporary understandings of heritage value.

 

 

Together, these two titles have been downloaded over 12,000 times in 152 countries and territories. Our forthcoming titles include, A Guide to Performing Systematic Reviews of Health and Disease and Fundamentals of Dark Matter, both due to publish early next year.

What are the benefits of writing or using OA textbooks? Where’s the value?

There are many benefits to writing and using OA textbooks and the European Network of Open Education Librarians have created a toolkit to encourage use of OA materials and Open Educational Resources (OER). Some key points are listed below.

• Reaching a Global Audience: downloads and views from readers across the globe, particularly the Global South.
• Cost-Effectiveness: One of the most significant advantages of OA textbooks is their cost-saving potential for both library and student. OA resources can alleviate this burden, allow to redistribution of saved funds and make education more accessible for all.
• Adaptability: open licences enable reuse, modification and adaptation, enabling educators to make the content work best for teaching.
• Showcase Teaching Excellence: OA textbooks can help platform new approaches or area of study, and celebrate examples of teaching excellence.
• Encourage lifelong learning: Provide students with resources they can use and reference after their studies and into their careers.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity: Open access textbooks are available to anyone with an internet connection, supporting diverse learners, including those in remote or under-resourced areas, and those outside academic institutions(e. professionals and policy makers)
• Up-to-Date Content: Traditional textbooks can quickly become outdated. OA textbooks can be updated and revised more readily, ensuring that students have access to the most current information.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Open resources encourage collaboration among educators, fostering a community of shared knowledge and innovation.

To measure impact, we use both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our Statistics dashboard shows the readership and reach of our books, including a map of access. In addition, we are collecting testimonials and feedback from academics and students and engaging with the societal impact of our books (as discussed in a recent article in The Scholarly Kitchen). We interrogate our user analytics to understand which communities are interacting with our content and how they are using it in their own work.

Value in this context is calculated not only in terms of cost-saving on commercial provision, but also in the added value student experience. This includes showcasing teaching excellence to encourage enrolment in a particular course or providing a teaching and learning resources for a module that are underrepresented in commercial provision (i.e. those with smaller cohorts/interdisciplinary topics/less mainstream perspectives).

What does the future hold?

The future of open access textbook publishing in the UK looks promising, with increasing institutional support and growing awareness among educators. As the demand for affordable and accessible educational resources continues to rise, the potential for OA textbooks to reshape higher education is significant.

Open access textbook publishing represents a vital shift in the academic landscape, providing a sustainable, equitable, and collaborative approach to education. As more institutions and publishers embrace this model, we hope to create a future where quality educational resources are accessible to all, empowering students and educators alike.

Significant sea change in the status quo requires a long-term outlook, and significant investment and commitment. If educators, students, and policymakers continue to discover and advocate for the adoption of open access resources within institutions, there is potential to foster an educational environment that fully supports and values accessibility, collaboration, and innovation.

UCL Press will continue to develop its programme of OA textbooks and to keep up to date with our publications, please do sign up to our mailing list or take a look at our website.

As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, following our earlier post on balancing openness and commercialisation, we’re now turning our focus to Citizen Science initiatives. Sheetal Saujani, UCL’s Citizen Science Coordinator, highlights in her article below how community-driven research and open access are shaping the future of knowledge creation, empowering individuals to make meaningful contributions to global challenges.

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Did you know that ordinary citizens are making significant contributions to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges – from climate change to wildlife conservation?

This year’s International Open Access Week continues to focus on the importance of community in scholarly research and open access initiatives.

Definition of citizen science at UCL

UCL supports a broad approach to citizen science, recognising that there are different applications and functions of citizen science in research, whether they are community-driven research projects or global investigations.

Citizen science is characterised as research conducted by the public, often in collaboration with academic institutions, and is a diverse practice involving academic and community researchers from various disciplines.

At its most inclusive and most innovative, citizen science involves ordinary people as partners in the entire research process, including determining research themes, questions, methodologies and means of disseminating results. The involvement of people in participatory research can range from short-term data collection to intensive involvement in the research process, from technical contribution to genuine research, and from open collaboration to co-creation of knowledge.

Citizen science promotes community-driven collaboration over profit-driven research

Citizen science is a model for open access and collective participation in research, ensuring the benefits of knowledge creation are accessible to all.  It embodies community-driven collaboration because it is built on principles of openness, inclusivity, and shared ownership of knowledge. The focus is on addressing real-world problems and empowering communities to take part in research that benefits everyone – not on generating profit for a select few.

Why does open access matter?

Open access refers to the free, unrestricted access to research outputs like journal articles, data, and educational resources. It ensures that research reaches the widest possible audience, and that it can be used and shared easily.

Open access aligns with the values of community engagement and citizen science by making knowledge and data open to the public. This allows people to engage in research without the barriers of paywalls or proprietary information, unlike commercialised research, where data can be restricted for profit.

Citizen science as an open, community-driven approach

Citizen science is a community-driven approach that focuses on problem-solving and knowledge expansion, promoting open collaboration and ownership. Citizen science projects typically share their findings openly. Initiatives like Zooniverse and iNaturalist offer open access to tools, software, and platforms, democratising knowledge. By enabling people to participate in and shape real research based on publicly accessible data, this approach promotes accessibility and inclusivity. It builds trust between researchers and the public, strengthening the quality and impact of research by drawing on collective wisdom and diverse perspectives.

Case studies: open access in citizen science

Below are two examples of successful citizen science projects that embody this week’s theme.

Air quality monitoring by communities: In the Open AQ project, citizens use open-access, low-cost sensors to track air pollution in their neighbourhoods. The data collected is shared freely and openly, allowing communities to act and policymakers to respond. This contrasts with commercial entities that might charge for proprietary pollution data or sensor technology.

Biodiversity conservation: iNaturalist invites people to document plant and animal species in their area. The data is shared freely, benefiting researchers and conservationists worldwide. No one is excluded based on ability to pay or access to commercial tools – everyone has a stake in biodiversity protection.

Challenges and opportunities: advancing with community in mind

Challenges of commercialisation in citizen science do exist: some citizen science platforms are commercialised, locking data behind paywalls or limiting access to paying users. Profit-driven research models hinder knowledge access, distort priorities, exploit participants, and compromise objectivity. To benefit society and produce shared findings, it is important to prioritise the public good and fair access to research.

Promoting open access in citizen science can enhance participation, diversity, and openness. Because citizen science invites participation from all, it offers opportunities for underrepresented communities and developing countries to contribute to and benefit from research. This inclusive model breaks down barriers in commercialised research systems, ensuring marginalised voices are heard and valued in the research process.

We would encourage everyone to support open access movements and citizen science platforms and projects that rank community benefit over profit.

Empowering the public through open access and citizen science

Open access and citizen science align with the theme of “Community over Commercialization” by prioritising collaboration and transparency in research. Open access removes barriers, while citizen science empowers people to participate in research projects. This approach puts the interests of the public first and benefits the wider population.

Looking towards the future, prioritising community-driven approaches in research can lead to more equitable, inclusive, and impactful research. Citizen science and open access work together to resist commercialised research, leading to a more equitable, community-centred approach to research.

As we celebrate International Open Access Week, let’s remember that when we put community at the heart of research, we empower everyone to contribute to the knowledge that shapes our world and makes a lasting impact on society.

Community over Commercialization was the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week. The organisers aim for this theme was to encourage a candid conversation about which approaches to openness prioritise the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.

This is related to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which highlights the need to prioritize community in its calls for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities” and support for “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges.” By focusing on these areas, we can achieve the original vision outlined when open access was first defined: “an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”

-adapted from openaccessweek.org

This week, in support of this theme we have launched our Citizen Science community for anyone at UCL that wants to get involved, staff, students, anyone! It’s the culmination of a lot of work from the team in the Office for Open Science and Scholarship and I wanted to close out the week with a discussion of how we have been approaching Citizen Science at UCL and what we are going to be doing next.

One of the core values of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and therefore the team behind the Citizen Science community, is to make everything we do as inclusive as possible of as many of the UCL subject areas as we can.

We use Citizen Science as a title, because it is a commonly used and recognised term, but as we want to create a broad community we have worked hard to create a unifying definition that we want to work to, and this is where this word cloud comes in! This is a work in progress where we are trying to collect as many terms for what we would consider to be a part of Citizen Science as possible and we are hoping that the new community will help us to develop this more and make it as comprehensive as possible!

So, what else have we been doing and what are we working on?

As well as the launch of the UCL Citizen Science Academy, over the past year or so, the team has been talking to a number of colleagues that have been working on citizen science projects to get insights into the projects happening at UCL (which we have added to our website), but also the skills and support that people would recommend for new starters. This will all feed into us recommending, commissioning or developing training and support for you, our community. The aim is to keep building up our existing citizen science related community and enable new, interested parties to get involved, supported by both us and the community as a whole.

We are always asking for information about new projects, feedback on how we can make our community more inclusive and looking for new words for our word cloud so please get in touch by email or by commenting below, we love to hear from you!

It has become somewhat of a tradition now for there to be a post during Open Access Week that reviews the previous year. While the middle of October may seem like a strange time to take stock, it is after all the anniversary of the Launch of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship and we like to stop and celebrate another year.

This year we celebrated another successful conference and our first back in person for us! We also had another first with a workshop taking place simultaneously online and in person on the topic of equity in authorship. This work has been fed into a UCL statement on Authorship that will be released in the coming months.

We also released a brand new page bringing together all of the training and support information across all the Open Science affiliated teams to make it easier to navigate and get your questions answered.

In the past year all of the teams that form part of the office have worked hard on developing new services and making improvements to existing ones.

The Open Access team have been working hard updating RPS and the new Profiles tool to replace IRIS. They also support both Gold and Green Open Access Activity across the university.

Over 18,500 items have been uploaded to UCL Discovery in the last 12 months, bringing the total to over 166,000! Of these, there are over 23,000 theses to be explored. They have also made 3,383 papers Gold OA, 2,700 of which were using our transformative agreements with publishers.

The Research Data Management team have been working hard behind the scenes doing an overhaul of their support materials, testing new materials for training and supporting the ever-growing Research Data Repository.

In the past 12 months we have had over 1000 new datasets from 226 users. Quite notably, we have had over 200,000 downloads which just goes to show the value of sharing your data as well as your other research outputs!

The Citizen Science support service has moved on in leaps and bounds since this time last year, creating content, liaising with colleagues across the university, collaborating to launch the UCL Citizen Science Academy and this week we were able to launch the brand new Citizen Science online community.

Hopefully that gives you a taste of what we have been up to and the numbers of the last year, scroll back through the blog for more information and to get an idea of the detail of what we have been up to. It’s been a great year and here’s to the next!

Happy Open Access Week!

Are you interested in citizen science?

Would you like to connect with others to share your stories about citizen science?

Are you wondering whether a citizen science approach might work for your project?

Would you like to collaborate with colleagues across UCL and exchange ideas or work together on participatory projects under a joint mission?

Do you want to hear about citizen science as an approach or would you just like to expand your network?

If so, please join our informal UCL citizen science community and get involved! Whether you are new to citizen science or whether you have run projects before, this is your community. We are bringing everyone together to share their knowledge, discuss good practices and talk about their experiences of citizen science.  The community is strictly for UCL members only but is open to all staff and students at all levels.

You might call it participatory research, community action, crowdsourcing, public engagement, or something else. UCL supports a broad approach to “citizen science”, recognising that there are different applications and functions of this approach in research, whether they are community-driven research projects or global investigations.

Through this community, we would really like to hear your feedback on what you would like to see from a potential citizen science support service at UCL including any ideas you might have for events, training, resources or anything else. Join here or search “UCL Citizen Science Community” on Teams.

We also have brand new and improved Citizen Science web pages on the UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship website which includes an introduction to citizen science at UCL including definitions, history, types and levels, and information about the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, you can browse through the various types of citizen science projects at UCL and learn about what your colleagues are doing in this exciting area!

On our new citizen science support and training page, you will find links to relevant training courses currently delivered by different UCL teams both online and in person, a variety of useful resources about citizen science, links to interesting blogs/news and citizen science platforms and projects outside UCL. We will be improving and expanding this content within the coming months.

 If you have any questions, would like further information or would like to tell us what you need, please contact us!