THE podcast: what is open access?

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In this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to two experts – one in the US and one in the UK – about open access, the global movement that aims to make research outputs available online immediately and without charge or restrictions. Unesco defines open assess as free access to information and unrestricted use of electronic resources for everyone, and applies this definition to texts, data, software, audio, video and multimedia. The idea is that knowledge, and especially taxpayer-funded research, should be available beyond the confines of subscription-based journals for anyone to use, build on and benefit from.

It feels like a timely topic, with the UK’s Research Excellence Framework consultation on open access launching this month and the US moving towards making all federally funded research available open access by the end of 2025.

Heather Joseph has been an advocate for knowledge sharing and the open access movement since its earliest days. She has been executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition since 2005 and is known for her policy work, leadership and international consultancy for organisations such as Unesco, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank. In 2021, she won the Miles Conrad Award, the National Information Standards Organization’s recognition of lifetime achievement in the information community. 

Steven Vidovic is the head of open research and publication practice at the University of Southampton in the UK. A palaeontologist with a passion for scholarly communication and knowledge exchange for public benefit, he is also chair of the Directory of Open Access Journals advisory board, Southampton’s institutional lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, and a member of Jisc’s transitional agreement oversight group.

His previous articles for Campus explain open research and decode the labels of open-access publishing.

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For more resources and advice on this topic, see our spotlight collection Unlocking the potential of open access and open research.