As part of International Open Access Week, Brunel invites all academics and students to a conference which brings together industry professionals and Brunel researchers to talk about their commitment to making openness in research a reality.

Tune in to our livestream to catch a talk by Dr Cameron Neylon from Curtin University

Abstract:
The theme of Open Access Week for 2016 is "Open in Action". A message to move beyond simply providing free access to traditional research outputs and to actively communicate our research to the people who might benefit. Yet for many academics it feels as though deep knowledge of a subject can increasingly be a disadvantage in making the case for things that matter. Michael Gove tells us the public is "sick of experts" and politics from Australia to the US seems increasingly driven by shrill voices willfully ignoring high quality information that could help us to make difficult decisions.

I will argue that to address this we need to both double down on the processes and institutions that makes scholarship valuable, but also to take that out into the world, and bring the wider world into them. Research is a social process and for the first time in history we have the technical ability to realise some of the core goals of earlier scholars. The question is no longer how to reach new audiences for our existing work, but to include the much broader forms of expertise that we can now access, in the very processes of research itself.