Do you have a responsibility to be open and how you can protect yourself when making research openly available?

Political shifts around the world, from the Trump administration in the US to Orban's government in Hungary, are making it more important than ever to have reliable research freely available. However, these governments are also making it more risky to be a researcher openly sharing the results of research in many countries and disciplines. Alongside the political censorship of research in some countries there are also changes to research funding, research being misrepresented and used to spread misinformation online, and concerns about the stability of open research infrastructure which is funded by the state. In these circumstances we will consider the value of open knowledge, the responsibilities of individual researchers and institutions to be open and how you can protect yourself when making your research openly available.

Chair

Jason Mckenzie Alexander, Professor of Philosophy at LSE and author of The Open Society as an Enemy.

Speakers

Martin Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London and Technical Lead of Knowledge Commons at MESH Research, Michigan State University, and co-founder of the non-profit open access journals publisher, Open Library of the Humanities.

Frances Pinter is a visiting fellow at LSE and has had an impressive career in publishing latterly focused on open access publishing.

Sara Rouhi has a long career in publishing and is a co-founder of the Declaration to Defend Research Against US Government Censorship.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.