Professor George Talbot, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) and Dean of Arts and Sciences, Edge Hill University will begin Open Research Week 2023 and welcome our keynote speaker, Dr. Ross Mounce. 

In this talk, Ross will reflect on how progress towards providing open access to all academic research is going; the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

The good is: we're starting to realise that a lot of the problem boils down to copyright issues. The emergence and normalisation of rights retention is undoubtedly healthy. The bad news is: there are significant problems in the way that money is being spent to enable open access e.g. "transformative agreements" (sic). Transformative for whom? The ugly: Journal Impact Factor™ is statistically illiterate, negotiable, and irreproducible, but some researchers are still making decisions using it.   The real question now is not can we get universal open access to research, but how.   

Dr Ross Mounce is the Director of Open Access Programmes at Arcadia - a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. He was previously a postdoc in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and a Panton Fellow for open data in science. Ross gained his doctorate at the University of Bath, where his thesis focused on the role of morphology in analyses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species.   

Open Research Week is supported by the Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) awarded by The Wellcome Trust to the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Liverpool 

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