Reflections on the Student Curator Project: In/Visible Lives: On the South Asian Residents of the Gulf

Rachel Deyis reflects about her curation ‘In/Visible Lives: On the South Asian Residents of the Gulf’ project, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrel library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.

It’s both a mildly terrifying and thrilling feeling to look back at the curation I’ve worked on over the last summer and think about it existing physically in the library and also somewhere on the web, accessible to anyone. As a project I am rather attached to, I find it hard to let go of the curation—a part of me wants to do just a little more research, add just another item to the reading list, in case there’s more to include. Of course, there is inevitably more I could have included: more research, more writing, more art. It would be incredibly reductive to suggest that a single curation could somehow encompass the expansive histories, lives and perspectives of South Asians in the Gulf. However, I do hope the curation works as an important starting point, as an introduction to the largest resident demographic in the Gulf, and a way of making space, both physically and metaphorically, for our experiences. 

I have stated in my introductory blog post that the curation’s aims have been to foreground, celebrate, question and facilitate engagement with the often neglected and misrepresented experiences of South Asians in the Gulf, embracing the complexity and diversity of our experiences. The process has been accompanied by its own set of challenges and rewards. When it came to the curation’s title, I found myself struggling to find something that fit. As Mohammed Karinkurayil notes, the Gulf is often narrated through the “poetics of secrecy” and the “idiom of revelation”, so it was important to me that the curation didn’t present the Gulf or the South Asian presence in it as a secret to be revealed. Positioning the curation as something that unveiled the Gulf or certain facts of Gulf life as a South Asian, felt dishonest. Consequently, the question of who I was curating for is one that persisted in the back of my head; I wanted the curation to be a resource for students, researchers and anyone else who was curious about the place and its people, but also for others like like me, who had grown up in the Gulf and for whom the South Asian presence in the Gulf was a fact of daily life, but also rarely encountered in academic, literary or artistic narratives. It is in light of this that I settled on the title, In/Visible Lives. The title’s hyphenation attends to the simultaneous underrepresentation and exclusion of South Asians from spaces, stories and discourses in and about the Gulf, and at the same time our paradoxical visibility, and also hypervisibility in humanitarian narratives.

I found the work of compiling a reading list for the curation incredibly enjoyable, allowing me to immerse myself in both academic and artistic work around the Gulf. Although scholarship in the fields of economics and development have studied the Indian-Gulf migration complex quite extensively, new and innovative anthropological, sociological and historical studies fill in gaps and offer alternative perspectives to mainstream narratives that have viewed South Asian-Gulf migration from a largely economic lens. Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens, for example attends to the alternative forms of citizenship enacted by middle-class Indians in the Gulf while Mohamed Karinkurayil’s The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala, published only earlier this year, draws on a range of visual and textual media to illustrate out how the Gulf has been understood and represented in Kerala. Texts in the history section, presenting the long Indian Ocean histories of the Gulf that predate oil, evince the transcultural dynamics that are and have always been present in the Gulf.

It was important to me that the curation also address the often unspoken gendered and sexual contexts of migration to the Gulf, including underrepresented queer and female perspectives. Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives provides insight into the intimate lives of migrant workers, challenging the human trafficking frameworks that reduce these workers, often women, to their labour. The ‘Queer’ section of the curation features fictional texts like Deepak Unnirkishnan’s genre defying collection of short stories, Temporary People and some academic work like Ryan Centner’s Peril and Privilege, which, although it focuses on Western, gay men in Dubai, reveals how classed, racial and gendered hierarchies of access to queer spaces in the city exclude South Asians, especially low-wage workers. Other works, like Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions suggest the vibrant queer socialities formed even under conditions of duress, asking for example, “what forms of homosocial/homerotic desire and relationality emerge in the all-male labour camps themselves”.

Having written my dissertation on South Asian migrant workers in the Gulf, I was somewhat aware of academic work around the topic but more doubtful about finding much creative work. However, I have been both humbled and thrilled to discover a rich, if emerging variety of artistic and literary works, from memoirs to film to music videos, finding creative work in unconventional forms and unexpected places. One of my favourite discoveries were the community-built Instagram archives like @gulfsouthasia and @humans.abudhabi that have emerged in the absence of ‘formal’ archives documenting the South Asian presence in the Gulf. Publications like ALA and Postscript magazine, and art foundations like Art Jameel also reveal a vibrant, emerging art scene, featuring the work of South Asian creatives like Vamika Sinha, Aathma Nirmala Dious, Vikram Divecha and Bhoomika Ghaghada.

Importantly, there is no single narrative the texts in this curation follow; some celebrate the South Asian presence in the Gulf, others draw attention to important humanitarian issues around labour rights, still others analyse the impact of the South Asian presence on the economies, societies and cultures of the Gulf and South Asian home countries they return to after retirement. I have had to make challenging decisions about which works I wanted to include, afraid that some would prop up exactly those narratives which reduced South Asian workers to their experiences of labour and hardship. However, it was important that those experiences weren’t erased either. The texts featured in the curation aren’t intended to stand in isolation—viewed collectively, they reflect the varied experiences and outputs of South Asians in the Gulf and the evolving narratives through which the South Asian presence in the Gulf has been perceived, understood and written about. Ultimately it has been my intention that the range of mediums and voices featured in this curation resist simplistic binaries or singular narratives and refuse to homogenise a multiplicitous and unendingly diverse group of people.

As I state on my curation page, this curation, as much as it has been my own project, is also the result of many people. I am very grateful to Dr Nadeen Dakkak and Professor Neha Vora for their help and recommendations. Beyond this, I am indebted to the assistance I received from the Library team who have been incredibly warm and supportive throughout the entire process. I have Antonio, Ilka, Dave and Kirsty, to thank for their wonderful advice in our meetings (and also for answering my many, many questions about copyright), to Kenny and the rest of the purchasing team for helping the curation take physical form, to Ned for help with social media promotion and to Steph for patiently guiding my not-very-tech-savvy self through the process of setting up the curation’s libguides page (and for rescuing it from being eaten up when I forgot to close my code).

The ‘See Yourself on the Shelf’ initiative has been a wonderful way to allow students to create spaces within the library collections that reflect our experiences and I am very grateful for this opportunity. Looking to the future I’m excited about the impact of the curation. Aside from a few articles like Jadaliyya’s, Losing Oneself in Gulf-Migrant fiction, I have yet to encounter any collections about South Asians in the Gulf, so I hope the curation plays an important role in dismantling stereotypes and promoting understanding about the Gulf and the South Asian residents it has long been home to—while also making it a little easier for others from the Gulf to find works that reflect on and celebrate their own lives and experiences. In the face of increasingly hostile immigration policies across the globe, this curation hopes to promote greater empathy and understanding of the complex and varied experiences of migration, celebrate the transcultural societies it creates and encourage readers to engage deeply, caringly and continually with migration narratives.

Reflections on the Student Curator Project: Armenian Genocide: A History Forgotten?

Fedor reflects about his ‘Armenian Genocide: A History Forgotten’ project, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrel library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.

When I began the curation, I had no clue about the way the university library was organised, and I was hoping to maybe order a few new books, specifically ones that I could not find when writing that one essay a year ago – what made me think about applying for this internship in the first place. Now, several months later and coming out of the internship, I know not only how the process of ordering books works, but I learned some HTML coding (something I feared, something I never even touched before). Not only have I had the opportunity to expand the library collections and set up an exhibition of my own, but I now know so much about what goes on behind the scenes of the reading lists that all (humanities, at least) students know and love.

In the beginning of the curation, I had a relatively vague idea of what to add into the collections – as a history student, and as is evident from my history-heavy introduction, I started with locating books that provided a wide overview of the history of the Armenian Genocide, but as the project develped, my research took several tangents. 

On one hand, I kept the guide I created with history in mind, and modelled the reading list structure off some of the reading lists that I encountered throughout my Bachelors and Masters history degrees. On the other hand, I did not shy away from including creations of culture that surround the theme of Genocide, and, towards the end of the curation, I incorporated materials that tie the events of 1915-1923 to today, culturally, politically, physically.

I have included works that invoke the role of the Genocide in modern day politics and international relations between Turkey and Armenia, both on state levels, and on personal levels, for the citizens of both states. Particularly interesting I found the topic of Crypto-Armenians, a phenomenon that is not too widely known in the western world – the descendants of those Armenians, who survived the genocide by assimilating into Turkey, sacrificing their names and identities. A book of testimonies of modern crypto-Armenians, who research their family histories and find inconsistencies with the lives that they lived in and discovering the dramatic truth of their real ancestry, finally realising why their grandparents had no cousins or brothers is an important centrepiece of my exhibition, highlighting events of over a century ago impact the lives of those alive today. 

Amplifying the voices of the witnesses of the Genocide, whether of armenian descent or witnesses of other nations was one of the key goals of the curation, and I am very happy with the results. I managed to locate and order several books that have never been published in the UK before, and several books that have only been translated to English in recent years, like Karnig Panian’s “Goodbye Antoura,”a harrowing account of the survival of an Armenian orphan. Quite notably, one of the first autobiographical sources on the Genocide, Aurora Mardiganian’s “Auction of Souls” was already available in the library collections, and so it took its rightful place next to the newly published voices. 

When assembling the LibGuide for the curation, I faced several challenges stemming from the sensitivity of the topic. Because I was working with a genocide, a lot, if not most, sources contained metions of unspeakable violence and brutality, including sexual, and including women, men and children. As such, a simple trigger warning at the top of the guide was not enough, and some of the entries in the reading list had to be equipped with further warnings. Same was true about the use of photographs. While most photographic evidence available from the Armenian Genocide have long been public domain, so copyright was not really an issue to me, the contents of the photographs presented an ethical challenge. When using pre-Genocide photographs of Armenian families and their peaceful life in the Ottoman empire, I had to bear in mind, that the majority of people from these images met a grizzly end. While I refrained from using pictures of dead bodies in my LibGuide directly, to make it slightly less distressing, some of the links that I have included lead to the collections of photographs that include photos of human remains and executions. While I think that using images of violence for shock value is not a good tone, these photographs are relevant historical testimonies. 

Another challenge came during the discussion of the denial of the Armenian Genocide, that is still a state policy in some countries in the world. Addressing this theme, I included academic works by Turkish and Armenian academics alike, including a work on the denial of the Genocide by the State of Israel, a truly fascinating read. In the LibGuide itself I chose to add a document created by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign affairs that denies the genocide, instead presenting a different interpretations of the events of 1915, invoking the violence of Armenian population against the Turkish population, and calling the numbers of victims “doctored.” While platforming a source that denies the genocide may be a controversial idea, I think that the viewers of the LibGuide and anyone who stumbles across it need an example of what the denial can look like, and make up their mind about it themselves.

If I had to work on a similar project again, I would probably spend more time working on obtaining more physical books and utilising the budget. Given the limited funding of the project and the relative expensiveness of the books that are available on the topic of the Genocide, I feel like I had to make very difficult choices at times, selecting several books instead of one that would be very relevant and needed, but would not fit into the budget.  

Overall, I think my work has been a success, enriching the library collections with many books, fictional and non-fictional, academic and eyewitness accounts, and making sure that the history of the Armenian Genocide does become forgotten, at least in the University of York.

By Fedor Topulev-Soludnov

Showcasing White Rose University Press: Quality and Innovation in Open Access Publishing

WRUP logo

The universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York have all hosted events across 2024 to showcase White Rose University Press (WRUP). This series of advocacy events aimed to further raise awareness of WRUP and its focus on ensuring academic quality, promoting open access, and driving innovation in publishing. With authors sharing their experiences of open publishing with WRUP,  and through an academic-led panel discussion on the value and challenges of open access, these events also sought to increase the awareness of, and engagement with, open access book publication. The events reinforced WRUP’s identity as the open access academic publisher for Leeds, Sheffield, and York, and reinforced its mission to support scholarly communication and barrier-free access to scholarship.

Engagement from the Academic Community

Each event was opened by an academic from the host institution, a key advocate for open access and for WRUP. Professor John Flint, Deputy Vice-President for Research at Sheffield highlighted the innovative publishing practices of WRUP and how these have helped catalyse the OA publishing sector towards a more equitable, ethical, and sustainable model. Professor Tom Stoneham, Head of the Department of Philosophy at York and outgoing Chair of the WRUP Editorial Board, emphasised WRUP’s core values and its openness to proposals from across the wider academy. Professor Nick Plant, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Leeds and the next Chair of the WRUP Editorial Board, stressed WRUP’s commitment to knowledge equity and highlighted the societal benefits of a digital-first publisher.

Professor Nick Plant delivering his talk. Photo courtesy of Masud Khokhar.

These perspectives from experienced academic leaders set the scene for relevant and timely discussions on how WRUP can serve its parent institutions with support for open access publishing. 

Author Experiences

Authors who have published with WRUP also shared their experiences during the sessions, providing valuable insights into the open access publishing process. Their testimonials highlighted the benefits of choosing an open access model, including greater visibility, wider dissemination, and the increased impact of their work.

Experiences of publishing with WRUP were shared by three experienced academic authors. Dr Wendy Michallat from the School of Languages and Cultures at Sheffield, the editor and translator of 320 rue St Jacques: The Diary of Madeleine Blaess (2018), praised the bespoke editorial service WRUP offers. She emphasised the support and guidance she received, and spoke about how this helped her realise her vision for her monograph as an unabridged scholarly resource with interdisciplinary reach. The book is at the heart of a suite of openly licensed resources that can be shared and reused to support learning across disciplines and academic levels.

Professor Penny Spikins from the Department of Archaeology at York shared her experience of publishing Hidden Depths: The Origins of Human Connection with WRUP. She highlighted the benefits of publishing open access books for researchers, including greater exposure for her research and subsequent opportunities to  further engage with the wider public through other routes. Penny also noted that open access publishing addresses issues around equality of access to research by making high quality publications available to read without financial barriers.

Dr Emily Bell from the School of English at Leeds discussed her positive experience in publishing the volume Dickens after Dickens open access with WRUP.  Again, making the publication available as widely as possible was important, but Dr Bell also stressed the responsiveness and service levels a smaller press could offer. 

Covers from recent WRUP publications
Recent WRUP publications

As well as advocating for open access publishing, both Dr Bell and Dr Michallat have shown continued support for WRUP, with both bringing a second publication to the press. Dr Bell and her associates are working on Digital Dickens, which will further showcase the digital capabilities of open access publishing, and Dr Michallat is working on additional translations of the letters of Madeleine Blaess in a volume that will complement her first WRUP publication. These researchers’ further collaboration with WRUP serves as a testament to the positive experience they had working with the Press.

Panel Discussion on Open Access Publishing

A significant portion of each event was dedicated to a panel discussion that explored the value and challenges of open access publishing. Facilitated by Michael Fake, the panel at each event was composed of academics, open access specialists, and colleagues supporting the wider scholarly communications area. The discussions explored the benefits and perceived challenges of open access book publishing. Attendees to the events were invited to submit questions in advance and could also actively participate in the session,  creating a lively interaction between the panellists and the audience.

Image by art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss

Key Themes and Insights

The Benefits of Open Access:

  • Open access helps  authors reach the widest possible audience with their work as it is freely accessible to and beyond the global academy, regardless of financial or institutional barriers. 
  • This enhanced availability and visibility increases the reach and citation of an author’s work, increasing the impact of their scholarly contribution.
  • The academic community benefits from this growing pool of open content, with research outputs licensed to make sharing and reuse a default position.

Challenges in Open Access:

  • The perception of open access publishing as in some way significantly different to traditional publishing persists. There are concerns about how open licensing works, how to use third-party owned content, and how authors’ rights are protected. In practice, these are issues that impact on open access publishing in much the same way as in traditional publishing, but the impression of greater challenges remains.
  • The complexities of funding models, availability of funding across different disciplines, and the sustainability of open access initiatives were keenly debated, as was the crucial need for strong institutional support to overcome these challenges.

The Future of Academic Publishing:

  • Academic publishing and university presses were thought to have a key role in fostering innovation.
  • University presses, especially those with a non-profit approach, can adapt to the changing landscape of scholarly communication, potentially leading the development of new open access models that balance the demand for quality with the need for sustainability.
  • Many new university presses are library-led, positioning libraries as both creators and consumers of open content. This dual role provides greater insight into the needs and challenges faced by both authors and readers, allowing for the prioritisation of non-commercial considerations.

Diverse Perspectives and Unique Insights

All three events brought a different perspective to the open access debate. Discussions took different trajectories, offering fresh and engaging insights into the opportunities and challenges that open access publishing brings. The range of viewpoints enriched the overall conversation, contributing to a more nuanced discussion of the issues at hand. Feedback indicates that attendees learned a great deal about OA publishing and about WRUP, and that this gives a platform to further build upon.

Next steps

These advocacy events were a significant step forwards in emphasising the WRUP’s role as the university press for the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. As well as offering a viable and proven route to high-quality and innovative open access publishing, WRUP provides an important aspect of the three libraries’ broader support for open access, being able to help academics from a position of practical experience. These events were the first step in a concerted drive to promote WRUP as an example of supportive open publishing that can help authors navigate the challenges, and enjoy the benefits of open access publishing. It is hoped this will foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of open access within the academic communities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York, and generate increased interest in WRUP as a publishing route. The events also generated ideas for further advocacy, both internal and external to the three parent universities, with the goal of continuing to raise WRUP’s profile and increase the numbers of internal and external submissions. 

This is a guest post authored by Lucy Cook, White Rose University Press Publishing and Communication Assistant. If you’d like more information, please get in touch with the WRUP team: universitypress@whiterose.ac.uk.

Recognising the work of our Open Research Engagement Leads 

In August 2023 the Open Research team welcomed three postgraduate researchers, Kirralise Hansford (Psychology), Luqman Muraina (Interdisciplinary Global Development) and Melissa Kays (Archaeology), as Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research in each of our academic faculties. The purpose of their roles was to work with the Library, staff and students across departments and schools developing open research training, advocacy and community-building initiatives. Kirralise, Luqman and Melissa wrote about their early successes and plans in a previous post, Next steps for the open research community at York. In this post we’ll summarise their achievements over the past twelve months and highlight some areas where work is still to be done.

Profile photos of Kirralise Hansford, Luqman Muraina and Melissa Kays
L-R: Kirralise Hansford, Luqman Muraina and Melissa Kays

Funding for the Graduate Engagement Lead posts was secured through an Enhancing Research Culture grant from Research England, and the role description and expectations have been closely aligned with the University’s Research Culture commitments. There was no precedent for a role such as this at York, and the first task for the Engagement Leads was to agree upon a set of achievable objectives and working patterns – hybrid and flexible – to make the most of their time working with us alongside completing their PhD. 

A key priority has been to formulate training and advocacy activities based on the needs and expectations of our research community. The Engagement Leads soon got to work developing an evidence-gathering survey for staff and students which was launched in the middle of semester one. The survey was tailored to each faculty and shared widely at both University and departmental level, making the most of our Engagement Leads’ knowledge of local contacts such as email and WhatsApp groups. We received over 300 responses from a wide range of disciplines and roles which have provided valuable insights and helped to inform a comprehensive set of recommendations in our survey report. The team benefitted especially from Kirralise’s skill in designing the survey instrument and analysing the data to allow for reproduction of figures and statistics, and further exploration of the responses. The survey report has been shared openly with the accompanying data and R analysis script on our Open Science Framework (OSF) project site. 

In terms of new resources for training and advocacy, three Open Research in Practice case studies have been created to highlight researcher perspectives into open research-engaged projects from the departments of Archaeology, Psychology and School for Business and Society. Further case studies have been lined up from a variety of departments based on submissions to this year’s Open Research Awards scheme, which were co-organised and judged by the Engagement Leads in partnership with Dr Nathalie Noret (Education). Melissa used her skills in research communication to create case study posters and launch a new Instagram account, helping us reach a broader audience and create a more visual narrative around open research at York activities. We also created an internal Open Research Newsletter which has been published every two months to provide timely updates and researcher perspectives. The audiences for these new communication channels are relatively small – around 100 followers and subscribers each – but we aim to continue developing these and review our use of social media as we assess the long-term sustainability of X/Twitter and possibility of migrating to other platforms. 

Open Research at York case studies and newsletter issues
Open Research at York case studies and newsletter issues

We have taken the opportunity to communicate our Engagement Leads’ achievements amongst other library professionals and open research enthusiasts with a poster on delivering open research culture change, delivered at this year’s Edinburgh Open Research Conference. Kirralise also attended the Oxford/Berlin School on Open and Responsible Research and Melissa participated in the British School at Athens Communicating Archaeology course, both of which provided opportunities to network and further their knowledge of open research-aligned practices in their disciplines. We hope to find more opportunities to share our successes and recommendations with the wider sector through conferences and publications next academic year. 

The Engagement Leads have continued to work closely with our Open Research Advocates network, aiming to increase engagement through consultations, occasional meetings and a revised set of guiding principles to set out the mission, benefits and expectations of membership. We have also strengthened our connections with other grassroots networks across the University including the ReproducibiliTea journal club and colleagues involved in the Enhancing Research Culture Workshops in Biology, recognising the essential role these groups play in the development of a practitioner-led, positive research culture at York. We would have liked to have done more in collaboration with practitioner-led groups this year, but we recognise that their efforts are often voluntary and everyone’s time is limited. Coordination of the Advocates network will remain a key objective going into next academic year, and we hope to involve them in a planned series of open research-aligned discussion seminars which Luqman has taken a key role in developing. We look forward to sharing further news of these events very soon! 

It has also been a year for reflection, as some activities were not as effective as we would have hoped. There was little engagement with a series of drop-in enquiry clinics we offered during Open Access Week, and mixed levels of interest in the Open Research at York events fortnight we organised in May. The discussions were nevertheless appreciated by those who attended and produced a useful set of recordings and resources on diverse areas such as open research in archaeology and heritage and writing lay summaries with AI assistance. We will continue to learn from these experiences as we develop the aforementioned seminar series and try to address topics which meet the most urgent needs and interests of our research community.

Delivering Open Research Culture Change poster at the Edinburgh Open Research Conference
Delivering Open Research Culture Change poster at the Edinburgh Open Research Conference

The Open Research team is hugely grateful for the work that Kirralise, Luqman and Melissa have contributed this past year, especially in terms of being able to learn from their perspectives and experiences as new ECRs. We are sorry to report that Kirralise and Melissa will be leaving us at the end of the summer as they focus on completing their PhDs, but we wish them all the best in the next stage of their careers and hope that they maintain their enthusiasm for open research in their future roles! Fortunately, Luqman will continue his work with the team and we look forward to building upon our achievements with his focus being on engaging with researchers in Social Sciences. 

Here are some final thoughts from our three Engagement Leads:

I have enjoyed my time over the last year working as graduate open research engagement lead for the Faculty of Sciences. This role has really shown me another side to open research focussing on how practices and resources can be implemented at a university level, and the challenges that can be associated with this. I hope that over the next year the work we started can continue to develop in ways which help researchers and students to access as many open research opportunities and practises as they wish to

Kirralise Hansford, Graduate Engagement Lead for Open Research (Sciences)

I take it as a great privilege to be appointed the Graduate Engagement Lead role. It’s personally provided a learning curve for me vis-a-vis the weekly meetings, completing team and individual tasks, in addition to making progress in my PhD research. As I continue in the role, I look forward to the development of the university’s research culture (especially in the Social Sciences), such that open research becomes the default.

Luqman Muraina, Graduate Engagement Lead for Open Research (Social Sciences)

The Open Research team at York is such a valuable asset to the university, and it’s been a great experience to aid in spreading the word about our tools, trainings, and events this year. For the Arts and Humanities faculty, Open Research often looks different from the sciences, and we were able to work together to identify areas of overlap and areas where we can create new opportunities for students. I look forward to seeing how the team continues to create innovative solutions and resources for University of York students in the future

Melissa Kays, Graduate Engagement Lead for Open Research (Arts and Humanities)

The Open Research team works in partnership with staff and postgraduate researchers to help you plan, publish and share your research. Further information about the University’s commitments, governance and support for open research can be found at Open research at York.

Student Curator Project: Armenian Genocide: A History Forgotten?

About the Student Curator

My name is Fedor, and I am a postgraduate Public History student at the University of York. 

Prior to my MA degree, I completed a BA (HONS) History degree at York, my main research interest being the history of Russia, Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, as well as histories of commemoration and ethnic conflict.

This guide will seek to enrich the collections of the University of York’s library with sources on the Armenian Genocide, as well as the history of Armenians as an ethnic minority in the Ottoman Turkey and beyond, parts of my own family originally coming from Armenia, this is a very personal topic.

About the Armenian Genocide

The Genocide of Armenian People of 1915-1923 is the established culmination of centuries of inequality and oppression of an ethnic minority under Ottoman rule, resulting in deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians across the Ottoman Empire and in displacement and deportation of millions. Other ethnicities have also been affected by the massacres and deportations, like Greeks, Assyrians and Kurds. The Genocide resulted in the de-armenisation of Turkish lands, and the destruction of Armenian cultural and spiritual heritage. The Genocide of 1915-1923 is largely considered the first genocide of the modern era and is believed to have the very term ‘genocide’ coined after it. The purpose of my curation will be to expand the University’s collections on the topic of the Armenian Genocide and raise awareness of the how the Genocide is viewed worldwide.

Armenian refugee family that has reached safety in Beirut, Lebanon.(Collection of Bodil Bjorn, via AGMI, http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/bodil_biorn.php)

Armenians in the Ottoman society before 1915

As a minority ethnicity in the broader Ottoman Empire, Armenians were well-integrated into society, despite their unequal treatment – as non-Muslims, they had to pay higher taxes and were not allowed to own weapons. They ran businesses, built churches and had schools that taught in Armenian. Despite the majority (up to 70%) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman empire consisting of poor peasants, the Ottoman stereotype of a greedy, well-off Armenian evading taxes persisted, those Armenians who managed to run a successful business faced hatred and xenophobia. For the brief time of 1908-1909, several Armenian parties were represented in the Ottoman senate.

Armenian-owned Tokatlian Hotel in Pera, Constantinople, c. 1900. (Photo 136, R. H. Kevorkian, P.B. Paboudjian, Les Armeniens Dans l’Empire Ottoman a La Veille Du Genocide. Editions d’Art et d’Histoire ARHIS, Paris, 1992)

Prior to the Genocide of 1915-1923, several Armenian pogroms took place across the six Vilayets (regions) with Armenian ethnic majority – Van, Erzerum, Sivas, Diyarbekir, Bitlis and Kharpout. Particularly notable were the massacres of 1894-96, that gave rise to the Ottoman resettlement of de-Armenised lands with Turks, Circassians and Caucasus muslims. 

Burned ruins of Armenian quarter in Adana, following the 1909 pogrom. (Archive of the German Assistance Association, Public Domain Image)

Reactions, Trials, Justice?

Armenians formed resistance groups and parties to defend their villages and settlements from genocidal Turkish forces and auxiliaries. While not always successful at stopping the better-equipped soldiers, this resistance saved many lives during the genocide. Particularly notable is the forty-days long defence of Musa Dagh mountain in 1915, that saved the population of neighbouring villages from being massacred. Thanks to the heroism of the resistance fighters, the village of Vakוflו stands to this day as the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey.

Armenian resistance fighters (Fidayiner) in Musa-Dagh, 1915, Public Domain Image

I think it may be said, without the least fear of exaggeration, that no more horrible crime has been committed in the history of the world…. this is a premeditative crime determined on long ago…. it was a long-considered, deliberate policy to destroy and wipe out of existence the Armenians in Turkey. It was systematically carried out. it was ordered from above…

Lord Robert Cecil, the Under-Secretary of State for foreign Affairs.
House Of Commons, Hansard (5th Series), Vol. LXXV, 16 November 1915, Cols. 1770-1776.

Britain, France and the United States knew of the genocide, and condemned it, offering little assistance to Armenians on the ground, but helping refugees and survivors of the deportations after the First World War. War crime tribunals were set up for the leaders of the Young Turks directly responsible for the massacres and deportations. However, by the time of the start of the hearings, some of the architects of the Genocide, including Talaat-pasha, Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire in 1917-1919 and the minister of internal affairs in 1913-1917 managed to escape Turkey and avoid the tribunal. In absentia, the escaped Young Turks were sentenced to death. 

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) party, not satisfied with the escape of the leaders of the Young Turks from the tribunal, ordered their assassination. The order was carried out by Armenian freedom fighters who lost their families in the genocide. Talaat-Pasha, the architect of the genocide was shot in the street in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehleryan, who surrendered himself to authorities minutes after the assassination and was acquitted by the court. While Dashnaktsutyun claimed that the purpose of these assassinations was not  terror or eradication of the Turkish population, but rather carrying out the sentence of the military tribunal, this revenge operation remains a morally questionable act. 

The Genocide today

The Genocide remains relevant for Armenians all around the world to this day. The Genocide Memorial day, April 24th, sees mass manifestations in Armenia and across the global Armenian Diaspora,from the United States to Lebanon, urging people not to forget the horrors of 1915-1923. 

The events of 1915-1923 have been a staple part of the Armenian culture, resurging particularly around the centenary of the genocide, with songs, films and book dedicated to the Genocide frequently published, and a pushing a revived interest in family history and pilgrimages to the former sites of genocide.

In diversifying the University of York’s library collections, I am hoping to raise awareness of the Genocide, and provide resources for scholarly research of the Genocide at the University of York.

Student Curator Project: In/visible Lives: On South Asian Residents in the Gulf

Photographer Sohail Karmani, “Photographic Essay: The Fishing Harbour”, Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi, 2016, via https://karmani.photography/mina-zayed

Meet the Student Curator

Hi! I’m Rachel, a third-year English and Related Literature student. I’m particularly interested in migrant literature and decolonial practice within academic spaces. Today, I am excited to announce that I will be working with the University Library to curate a collection titled In/visible Lives: On South Asian Residents in the Gulf. Through this curation I hope to cultivate the diversity of the University Library collections while creating a space which foregrounds the experiences of the various South Asian communities in the region.

Why South Asian-Gulf Migration?

Most literature and scholarship around South Asian diasporas tends to be oriented around South-North migration. While incredibly important in their own right, I found that these accounts were quite different from and rarely captured the particular transience of growing up as an immigrant in the Gulf—a place I would never legally belong to. The Gulf’s citizenship laws which prevent naturalisation, produce longstanding migrant communities, often three or four generations old, who remain unrecognised as citizens and who must return to their home countries upon retirement. 

As a third-generation migrant myself, while I’ve lived my whole life in the UAE, I remain an Indian citizen. Resultantly, after coming to the UK, I often found myself struggling with introductions. When asked where I was from, I was careful to distinguish that I only grew up in the UAE, never feeling like I could claim the country as my own. Deepak Unnikishnan, award winning author of Temporary People, incisively articulates the feeling in his piece with The Common:

“I started putting Abu Dhabi in my bio in the early aughts. It was an act of resistance, which nobody, except me, cared about. I needed people to know I had roots in the Arabian Peninsula. That people like me—children of the transient diaspora the Gulf cultivated—nonchalant about allegiance and flags, counted and existed”.  

It is these complexities around citizenship, migration, and identity that felt both personal and wider-reaching, that are in some ways unique to the Gulf and in others reflective of a process of neoliberal globalisation that produces and unevenly disadvantages a global working class, that fostered my interest in curating around South Asian residents in the Gulf.

South Asian Migration to the Gulf: A Brief Background

Often referred to as the Gulf countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprises 6 countries, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The population of most Gulf countries tend to be heavily skewed towards expatriates who outnumber the national population in 4 out of the 6 GCC countries. South Asian migrants in particular form the largest expatriate population in the Gulf, with the South Asian-Gulf migration corridor being one of the largest in the world. 

Most popular accounts of South Asian migration to the Gulf tend to focus on low wage male migrant labourers, particularly looking at the construction workers behind the skyscrapers, luxury malls and theme parks that cemented the global renown of modern metropolises like Dubai and Doha. However this belies the diversity of the South Asian resident communities in the Gulf; from low wage and domestic workers, to middle class doctors, lawyers and various white collar workers and wealthy upper class business executives, South Asian residents occupy a range of professions. Additionally, although migration to the Gulf is often understood within the context of the 1970’s oil boom that attracted an enormous influx of migrant labour from South Asian countries, South Asian-Gulf migration has an extensive pre-oil history and can be traced to pre-Islamic eras as far back as the 7th century, when Indo-Arab trade was flourishing.

Maritime Museum of Kuwait. Azhar Munir Din, 2021, Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/grayscale-photo-of-boat-on-dock-EfcB5iAKV5M).

What are the Aims of my Curation?

As an international student in the UK I’ve noticed how people’s reactions towards the Gulf tend to reflect very different conceptions about the place than my own. More often than not, reactions followed one of two narratives: the first conjured up an image of immense wealth and consumerism as seen in the likes of Dubai Bling—a glimmering mirage of a city often condemned as a tourist trap, superficial and inauthentic—while the second was based on humanitarian reports about gendered and sexual or migrant labour rights violations, like the recent 2022 Qatar World Cup controversy. The extremes of the wealthy and exploitative that these narratives swivel between create what Neha Vora calls “a place of fantasy”(1). Often, they reflect orientalizing and exceptionalist conceptions of Gulf societies as illiberal and backwards—in comparison with their supposedly liberal and progressive Western counterparts (2) . In both instances, South Asian residents are made selectively visible, occupying the unseen peripheries of the glamorous city, or understood only as passive victims.

In light of this, my aims for the curation are threefold. Firstly, it is my intention that this curation will move beyond such reductive narratives, by illustrating the richness and diversity of the experiences of South Asian resident communities in the Gulf—who, as Nadeen Dakkak has observed, often simultaneously occupy positions of marginality and  power (3). 

Secondly, drawing on a range of economic, historical, sociological, literary and artistic materials this curation will strive to be attentive to how mutually constitutive networks of migration, gender, sexuality, race and class shape migrant experiences, including the often underrepresented experiences of queer and female South Asian residents.

Thirdly, through the curation I aim to both highlight the structural disadvantages endured by South Asian resident communities while also celebrating their too often unrecognised impact on their various countries of residence in the Gulf. In particular, the scholarly and artistic works within the collection unveil alternative modes of citizenship and belonging that are enacted by South Asian resident communities on the ground even while they are refused legal citizenship.

Doha. Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/the-bright-sun-shining-over-a-skyscraper-in-doha-qatar-p_qrO1Ygnzo).

Why Now?

In a recent article in the Guardian Jhumpa Lahiri suggests that “our global ‘obsession” with what is original or authentic is ‘very problematic’ and is partly responsible for ‘the fallout we’re seeing now’ in Gaza and in the three countries she has connections with: India, Italy and the US”. In light of ongoing issues around migration where laws around citizenship and national borders dictate who gets to belong to or reside in a place, often at great cost to human life, I hope that this curation will resonate with global matters of migration, citizenship and belonging while also filling in gaps in understanding about the Gulf and the South Asian diasporic communities it has long been home to.

  1.  Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens.
  2.  Vora and Koch, Everyday Inclusions.
  3.  Nadeen Dakkak, Contesting Narratives of Victimization in Migration to the Arab Gulf States: A Reading of Mia Alvar’s ‘In the Country’.

This blog was updated with a change terminology from ‘immigrant(s)’ to ‘resident(s)’ (July 2024)

Open Access Week 2023: Open access publishing – the growth of a community

Kate Petherbridge (Press Manager, White Rose University Press) on challenging the commercial focus in academic publishing

Open access (OA) publishing is no longer new, though the OA landscape continues to evolve. There are now a range of publishers offering OA publishing routes. Numbers of new OA university presses continue to grow as more institutions see the value of offering in-house, practical support for OA publishing and for their academic authors who are engaging with this.

Road sign indicating no entry ahead and a turning point to the left
Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

The current publishing landscape is very different to that which the earliest OA presses joined. Presses like the University of York’s own OA university press, White Rose University Press (operated in collaboration with the Universities of Leeds and York), and UCL Press opened around 2015/2016. They found new OA presses like themselves were fairly isolated voices in a commercially-dominated world. They were in the vanguard of a growing movement, however. Indeed, the 2017 report Changing publishing ecologies:  A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing by Janneke Adema and Graham Stone, discussed this emerging new wave of university and scholar-led presses, the majority of which were OA or part-OA, and highlighted the impact this trend could have on what had become a very commercial publishing industry. The growth of, and increasing funder focus on, OA dissemination drove development, and brought the publishing industry to a turning point.

A growing sense of community

Many OA university presses are library-led, or connected to the university library. Some, including White Rose University Press (WRUP), have press managers and staff with library backgrounds – though many others come from the commercial publishing sector too. A theme that unites many OA presses is the drive to deliver “publishing as a service”, with a strong connection to the open research and scholarly comms support institutions offer to their academic staff. As well as this support for the local academy, a central part of WRUPs vision and mission is a commitment to support the wider OA movement. It’s notable that OA presses and publishing operations see their peers not as competitors but as allies in making the change to an open scholarship environment.

The emphasis on this shared goal, and the drive to support each other as part of a wider publishing movement, is a strong foundation on which to build a community. As the first wave of OA presses emerged, there was an initial sense of togetherness and of sharing of new knowledge and processes as presses established themselves. This was done informally across what was, initially, a small number of presses. Over time, we grew in numbers and experience and were able to work together as a community in more concrete ways. 

An active OA publishing community emerges

Screenshot from Jisc New University Press Toolkit
Screenshot from Jisc New University Press Toolkit, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) licence

In 2021, some of the more established of the new OA university presses came together to work with Jisc on a toolkit. This was designed to support other universities who were looking to set up their own OA university presses. The New University Press Toolkit gives advice on different business models, on setting up editorial and management structures and processes, and also shares examples of governance documentation. It is based on the experience of the presses (including White Rose University Press) that make up the toolkit’s editorial advisory board. These publishers were happy to come together to support new players in joining the OA publishing arena. This would be counter-intuitive in a commercial-focused environment. The switch to a service and support ethos means that aiding the growth of the OA sector brings benefits for all involved. Increasing the OA publishing options, and helping new voices join the debate, adds further weight to the OA publishing movement and strengthens the community behind this.

A diverse institutional OA publishing environment

To this point, this post has focused on OA publishers and presses. An OA university press is often the most visible way an institution can deliver OA publishing activity, but the OA publishing ecology is actually very diverse. The numbers of universities who are founding their own OA presses continue to increase. However, for some institutions this is not a viable option, or not an option they currently want to pursue. Universities without a formal OA press can still undertake institutional OA publishing activity. Some institutions, for example, host open infrastructure that supports publication of OA books and/or journals by their academic colleagues. In some cases, like Edinburgh Diamond, these services are also offered externally, to the wider academy. Some institutions offer formal OA publication options to their academics via institutional repositories. Some provide infrastructure to host open teaching resources. All these OA publishing activities are equally valid and are important elements of a successful change to an open scholarship environment. Some may not consider themselves as publishing, however, or perhaps to this point have not felt able to join discussions that have focused primarily on formal university or scholar-led presses.

The increasing recognition of the diversity of the OA publishing community, and the value this diversity brings, is important. It is another difference between this and commercial publishing, where the focus is on formal publishing via a recognised publisher. All those who undertake OA publishing activities face similar issues, however. Discussions about funding, policy, compliance, licensing, rights, dissemination, academic rigour, production processes, will be common across all these activities. The different perspectives and approaches they bring can only help in e.g. establishing best practice, and in finding new solutions or ways to communicate key messages. 

The importance of open institutional publishing in all its forms is recognised in the founding of a new association, the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA). WRUP has been instrumental in setting this up, and it is designed to bring together a community of practice that supports OA publishing activity at HEIs in the UK. 

Open Institutional Publishing Association logo
OIPA logo © 2023 Open Institutional Publishing Association

Formalising this gives a shared voice to often small OA publishing undertakings that nevertheless, together, make a significant contribution to OA support in the UK. This new association is open to membership applications and is in the latter stages of setup and launch, with the inaugural meeting set for November 2023. The level of interest and membership applications already received show the engagement of the OA publishing community. It reinforces the position that this area of publishing is focused on collaboration and mutual support, rather than commercial competition. In strengthening the OA institutional publishing community, we are also strengthening the support this community can give to academic authors as the move to open scholarship continues. 

Open Access Week 2023: Every week is Open Access Week at York

Paula Schirrmacher (Research Intelligence Analyst) introduces a new dashboard which visualises the University’s open access publication practices.

Screenshot from the Open Access dashboard showing a pie chart for article publications, segmented approximately by the following open access types: 30% gold; 30% hybrid gold; 20% green; 20% not open access. Routes to open access are mostly 'other', but about 50% of hybrid gold articles are through transformative agreements.
Screenshot from the Open Access dashboard

To monitor our progress in open access practices, the Open Research team combined internally collected data on open access routes and publicly available data on open access formats for University of York publications in this interactive dashboard. Cycle through the years and discover how open access publication formats at the University of York develop over time and explore the evolving role of our transformative publishing agreements (TA) and the York Open Access Fund (YOAF)!

We maintain a growing array of transformative publishing agreements that allow our researchers (corresponding authors) to publish open access in gold and hybrid gold journals without additional charge. Alternatively, any author affiliated with the University of York can apply to the York Open Access Fund to make their publication open access. Whilst the above promote gold and hybrid gold open access formats, we have recently also launched a new research publications and Open Access policy, enabling researchers to reuse and share their work in any journal without giving up rights to their scholarship.

Different formats (green, hybrid gold, gold) come with their distinct advantages and disadvantages. Green open access formats allow authors to self-archive their articles and are usually free of charge. Gold and hybrid gold make articles permanently and freely available on the publishers website for anyone and anywhere, but usually involve a fee. Our open access and publishing your research web pages provide further guidance and we will soon be launching a new Practical Guide to help consolidate and clarify publishing processes for researchers.

Of course, we practise what we preach and made all code and data for our dashboard available in this GitHub repository.

Open Access Week 2023: Promoting preprints

Ben Catt (Open Research Librarian) describes the benefits of research preprint sharing and support provided by the University Library

Stacks of papers on table

‘Stack of books on table’ by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The Open Research team recognises the importance of preprints – early versions of research publications, typically articles which have yet to undergo peer review – to many in our research community. The sharing of preprints is common practice across a range of disciplines and ties in with the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week as a fundamentally noncommercial and community-based approach to open research dissemination. 

The opportunities presented by preprints and considerations for researchers are addressed in our Open Research Skills Framework. Preprint sharing has been widely championed in recent years by proponents such as the Center for Open Science (COS), and strongly encouraged by funders including UKRI (in particular MRC and BBSRC) and Wellcome. Preprint sharing benefits authors by enabling them to disseminate their work rapidly and directly to the research community at a global scale through subject-specific open access repositories or servers. Preprints are versionable (they can be updated or corrected) and provide a route for researchers to receive feedback and commentary from peers. They are indexed by the likes of Google Scholar, PubMed and Scopus, and can help authors to improve the visibility and reach of their work. Many repositories now provide item-level DOIs (digital object identifiers) which make preprints easily citable and part of the permanent scholarly record.  

Preprint workflow diagram: a manuscript can be posted to a public preprint server within a 48 hour screening process where it is subject to community feedback, ideas and discussion. This is contrasted with a peer reviewed paper which can take months to years to reach the public via a private process of journal submission, peer review, rejection and revision.

‘Preprints enable rapid dissemination’ by Jessica Polka from Preprinting to broaden scholarly dialog, incorporating FxEmojis by Mozilla; provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

It’s difficult to measure the full scale of activity across the University, but many researchers have recorded their preprints in Pure and several of those recognised in our York Open Research Awards have shared preprints of their work. This includes Early Career Researchers (ECRs) for whom preprint sharing provides an opportunity to contribute to their field and establish the priority of their findings and ideas ahead of publication or for inclusion in grant applications. Our Graduate Engagement Leads will soon be launching faculty-specific surveys into open research at York which will help us better understand the current rate of engagement with preprints and other practices amongst our community. 

Researchers in a wide range of scientific disciplines will already be familiar with arXiv, the original preprint distribution service launched in 1991 and now hosted at Cornell University with over two million papers in their repository. The Library has been an institutional member of arXiv since 2018, one of our early efforts to help fund external infrastructure which enables open research practice (see Supporting the wider open research ecosystem for more of our commitments in this area). Preprint sharing has become established in other disciplines in recent years and we are pleased to announce that we have made small donations to four other repositories, spanning each of our academic faculties at York:

Preprint repository logos: arXiv, engrXiv, MediArXiv, PsyArXiv and SocArXiv

Logos are the legal property of their respective owners, used with permission or in accordance with their terms; arXiv logo is a registered trademark of arXiv and Cornell University; MediArXiv and SocArXiv logos are provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

We acknowledge that there are issues to be addressed in the rise of preprint sharing, principally how the dissemination of unreviewed papers may contribute to the spread of misinformation in certain fields. This is especially serious when it comes to questionable medical research which made headlines at the height of the pandemic, although advocates may argue that this is not a new issue and that problematic preprints can be addressed rapidly whereas it has taken years for published papers to be formally retracted by journals. Many repositories have responded to concerns of quality-control with moderation and screening processes as well as crowd-based open peer review features to help scrutinise submissions and tackle misinformation. The Library also supports the PCI (Peer Community in) non-profit organisation which provides a review and curation process for preprints across many scientific fields, as well as facilitating onward publication in around 100 compatible journals. 

Most publishers accept preprint sharing as standard practice and encourage authors to engage with the process, for example BMJ supported the launch of the medRxiv preprint server for health sciences in 2019 which became an important source of Covid-related research the following year. Big commercial publishers have also been investing in preprint infrastructure, for example Elsevier’s acquisition of the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) in 2016. However, some publishers and journals may still reject papers which have been disseminated prior to submission so it’s important for researchers to understand publisher policies when considering their options (Sherpa Romeo provides a useful policy search tool).

We know that some researchers see limited value in preprint sharing, or regard the practice with scepticism or concern. We would therefore like to invite our research community to contact the team directly (lib-open-research@york.ac.uk) to share views on preprinting, raise suggestions for training needs or to propose any other repositories or initiatives that the Library should consider lending its support to. 

Further reading:

Additional guidance on preprints can be found in this Primer from UKRN (video embedded above) and ASAPbio have shared resources and activities to promote good use. Other useful resources include OSF Preprints, a search tool covering all of their hosted repositories and a wide range of disciplines, and the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories provides a comprehensive list of services. A recent paper by Doron and Branch-Elliman examines and makes recommendations on the state of preprinting in medical research since the height of the pandemic, and Knöchelmann goes in depth on the applicability of preprinting in the wider context of ‘open humanities’. Finally, a critical take on preprinting culture is offered by Emily M. Bender, who makes a nuanced case that Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow.

Open Access Week 2023: Like an open book – an open access future beyond the journal article

Jon Cook (Open Research Project Officer) discusses the latest development in open access publishing for monographs and chapters

Stack of hardback books
‘Book stack on white background’ on Rawpixel.

Are you publishing your work open access? Until recently, the answer probably depended on the format of your research output. Open access for journal articles is extremely well established, having developed over the past thirty years to the point where nearly 85% of York-authored journal articles are now made freely available on (or shortly after) publication. This is a success story but also something of a double-edged sword. It has led to a perception that open access is uniquely linked to the journal article as a format, and of relevance only to those subject areas where research articles are the predominant mode of publication. For this reason, open access for books has, until very recently, been an alien concept. This has been gradually changing, and 2024 looks to be the year that the revolution truly begins. 

The book is an older concept than the journal article and remains the primary way that we transmit written knowledge. To a greater degree than a research article, a book “is not simply a linear text”. Its form and physicality are part of the reading experience, layout and images more central to the presentation1. This has made the very act of transferring books to an electronic format difficult. With academic texts this is further complicated as they often include third-party materials that it may not be in the author’s right to share openly. Perhaps then there are functional reasons behind the slower uptake of open access for books than for journal article. 

On the other hand, time and technological progress have, to some extent, blunted the edges of these historical challenges. Whilst e-reading is not perfect and has been somewhat slow to evolve past a basic functionality, its popularity remains stable. It has proven, in the fiction sector especially, to be an enduring format rather than a fad. Likewise, in the academic world there is now practical guidance for authors looking to manage copyright for third-party materials in their work. Perhaps most importantly, there is a recognition that print and electronic formats can, and should, co-exist. For many people and in many situations, print books will continue to have a relevance and pre-eminence. Yet there is a growing realisation that open access electronic materials can complement print by providing wider access, especially in areas where printed copies may be less obtainable for financial reasons or because they have gone out-of-print. This is especially important for monograph materials in the arts & humanities, which tend to have a longer period of academic relevance than scientific journal articles, which can be more quickly superseded by newer studies. Far from being irrelevant to the humanities, electronic provision, and open access more specifically, can be central in meeting some it its traditional challenges.

If there is nothing in the format of the book itself that should disqualify a move to open access, perhaps the sluggishness to move in this direction has been more rooted in the makeup of the publishing landscape. The uptake of open access for journal articles, especially in the sciences, has been made easier by institutional agreements. These see universities pay an annual fee that allows their authors to publish articles within a range of the publisher’s journals without paying an article processing charge (APC). APCs charged on individual articles cost an average £2,000-£3,000 per article but can reach as high as £10,000. They are a significant barrier to authors who are looking to publish in journals outside of institutional agreements and can dissuade them from committing to make their articles openly available. As Roger Schonfeld points out, academic publishing in STEM is populated by a number of large-scale conglomerated publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Their scale, and share of the academic literature, makes deals with university consortia easier to negotiate and more worthwhile for all parties. Humanities on the other hand has not seen the same accumulation of power with just a handful of publishers, and there remain many independent humanities houses.

Person holding a Kindle ebook reader with coffee, croissant and print books in background
‘Person holding kindle ebook reader’ on Pexels.

Whilst institutional agreements do favour STEM subject areas, this has left a far from barren open access environment in the humanities, and for academic book publishing in general. Monograph publishers have simply had to be more inventive in their offerings. What we see as a result is real diversity in models for funding and producing open access books. University presses, such as our own White Rose University Press, continue to flourish and many provide an established route for authors looking to publish in an open access format, with their business models usually being supported by author fees. Elsewhere, the independent Open Book Publishers offer a fee-free publishing route on a framework underpinned by profits from the print sales of their open access books. Consortial funding models also look to avoid charging authors to publish their work. The Direct to Open initiative, facilitated by MIT Press, asks supporters to make a donation towards its yearly target. When this is met, its entire corpus is made openly available. Society publishers such as the Royal Historical Society (RHS) are also forging ahead with partner funding models such as that which RHS use to produce their New Historical Perspectives series. Whilst many such initiatives are in their formative stages, they show a real desire by book publishers to provide their authors with open access solutions. Additionally, the York Open Access Fund provides funding for York authors to allow them to explore their options and choose the best fit for their work. 

White Rose University Press logo
White Rose University Press logo

The existence of open access publishing routes doesn’t necessarily drive an uptake of open access though, and without other factors influencing development it would likely remain a niche interest within predominantly book-based research communities. For journal articles, open access in the UK really gained traction with the introduction of UKRI (then known as RCUK) policies beginning in 2006. These required authors to publish via open access channels but also made funding available to make this possible. That UKRI, the UK largest funding body, have previously held off on similarly mandating open access for their funded books, can be taken as an admission that they felt the landscape for this type of publishing was not yet mature (though the Wellcome Trust’s open access monograph policy dating back to 2013 must be acknowledged as a trailblazer on a smaller scale).

The 2024 introduction of a mandate from UKRI requiring authors to make their books openly available on publication is therefore a real step change for open access in this area. It has the potential to normalise the open publication of monograph material and give authors the same freedom to make their work openly available as they would enjoy if they were publishing a journal article. Initially £3.5 million will be ringfenced for this purpose. There will be challenges in implementing the policy: as Samuel Moore and Niamh Tumelty point out, the hope is to avoid some of the unsustainable funding models that arose after the advent of journal article funding mandates 4. Yet, if the policy is a success it will go a long way to dispelling one of the more persistent myths around open access: it need not apply especially to one format of research output, nor to particular subject areas only. With the right backing, and support for equitable and transparently funded publishing models, we can be successful in more widely sharing the substantial segment of the University’s world-class research that is currently published in book form.

Further Guidance

The Open Research team can help with any questions relating to the new UKRI monographs policy. UKRI have also published guidance about complying with their policy, and are hosting a webinar aimed at researchers and support staff on 8th November. The York Open Access fund can also help authors to publish via fully open access routes where alternative funding is not available. Any staff or student affiliated with the University is able to apply to the fund. 

References

1 Crossick, G. (2016). Monographs and open access. UKSG Insights, 29(1), p.17. Available at: doi: 10.1629/uksg.280 [Accessed 18 October 2023].

2 University of Oxford. (2023). Paying for open access articles. [Online]. University of Oxford. Available at: https://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/oa-payments [Accessed 17 October 2023].

3 Schonfeld, R.C. (2023). Will humanities and social sciences publishing consolidate? The Scholarly Kitchen, 22 February 2023. Available at: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/02/22/hss-publishing-consolidate/ [Accessed: 18 October 2023]. 

4 Moore, S.A. and Tumelty, N. (2021). Reflections on the new UKRI open access policy, UKSG Insights, 497. Available at: https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-497/reflections-new-ukri-open-access-policy [Accessed 23 October 2023].