This year’s International Open Access Week theme asks ‘Who owns our knowledge?’, challenging us to reflect on not only who has access to the research we produce, but on how knowledge is created and shared. Significant progress has been made in some areas towards putting ‘Community over Commercialization’, the theme of OA Week in 2023 and 2024), but new concerns and risks have emerged:
The rush to scrape academic knowledge to train artificial intelligence models and to integrate AI into academic processes—often without proper consultation or author consent—threatens to undermine our knowledge systems. Surveillance that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through some publisher platforms. Nevertheless, the community-owned, community-led, and non-commercial approaches to knowledge sharing called for by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and Toluca-Cape Town Declaration offer pathways away from these risks toward a future where individuals and communities own and benefit from their own knowledge.
The University of York Library has a longstanding commitment to Supporting the wider open research ecosystem, in line with many other UK universities and pledges made in the recent N8 Statement on Sustainable Scholarly Publishing (see our previous post, Pathways to sustainable scholarly publishing). Despite a backdrop of financial challenges across the sector, we have continued to support a range of initiatives, tools and infrastructure services that help facilitate open research practice. Most of the organisations we support can be described as community-led, and one of our key principles for support is that initiatives should operate on a not-for-profit basis or should be affiliated with a research or educational institution.
Approaches for supporting external initiatives are varied, ranging from small one-off donations to multiple-year subscriptions and formal memberships. We engage with collective and consortia-based approaches such as the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), now in its sixth funding cycle, and Jisc Open Access Community Framework (OACF), which is currently under review with the intention of opening up for a new round of applications in 2026. Recommendations and decisions are made by the Content and Open Research team, in consultation with the Collections Community group and in response to suggestions from our academic colleagues including members of the Open Research Advocates network.
Here, we highlight a selection of initiatives we have supported over the years:
Open Book Collective (OBC)
OBC is a charity bringing together publishers and libraries to secure the diversity and financial futures of open access book production and dissemination. They are a registered UK charity, with a governance structure that is community-led at its core. As a supporting member institution, the University Library collectively participates in decision-making relative to the OBC’s management, membership policies, and long-term strategic planning.
Through OBC we have the opportunity to directly support independent publishers across a range of disciplines, which include African Minds, Mattering Press, mediastudies.press, Meson Press and White Horse Press. We also support and utilise the open source metadata management and dissemination platform Thoth, which helps publishers get open access works into the book supply chain to ensure their long-term sustainability and accessibility. OBC also manages a Collective Development Fund, a grant giving programme for emergent open access book initiatives, which recently completed its second round.
PCI is a researcher-led organisation which provides an evaluation and recommendation service for scientific preprints. Authors can deposit their preprint along with data, script and code, in any open repository, then submit the article to a thematic PCI (community of researchers) where it undergoes rigorous open peer review by researchers in the field. Following evaluation, the paper may receive recommendation from the PCI, a form of validation which makes them complete, reliable and citable articles.
Authors can choose to publish their paper formally (without charge) in the Peer Community Journal, or submit it to a PCI-friendly journal which has committed to accepting PCI-recommended articles without need for further peer review. Another recent development is PCI Registered Reports, a community dedicated to reviewing and evaluating study proposals, thereby addressing certain publication and reporting biases that may be embedded in ‘traditional’ journals.
Back in May, Professor Christopher Chambers, PCI Publication Director, introduced PCI Registered Reports and contributed to a discussion on Registered Reports and the future of peer review with researchers from Psychology and Education.
OAPEN
The OAPEN Foundation is an open access advocacy organisation based in the Netherlands, which counts the University Library amongst its supporting members. They work to promote and support the global transition to open access for academic books through infrastructure services for publishers, libraries and funders. Their services includes the OAPEN Library, which recently marked its 15th anniversary and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a searchable discovery tool which indexes almost 100,000 open access titles including our own White Rose University Press publications. DOAB results are also integrated into YorSearch and Reading Lists.
Another key resource is the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit, which aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. It provides quick and brief introductions to specific topics, mapped to an eight-stage research lifecycle. The Library has integrated and signposted some of this guidance in our own Open Access Publishing Practical Guide.
Programming Historian
Programming Historian delivers openly-licensed peer reviewed tutorials which help arts and humanities researchers discover new digital tools, techniques and workflows. They encourage practitioners to use their lessons for learning new technical skills and teach about new methods in classes or workshops. The lesson index is organised by stages of the research process and includes over one hundred tutorials on topics including coding, data analysis and visualisation, which we refer to in our Digital Skills guides.
The project is international, volunteer-driven and not-for-profit, supported by individual donations and a broad institutional membership including the University Library. Their publishing model adheres to the ‘diamond’ form of open access with no charges placed on authors or readers of their tutorials, and they are recognised by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – another key piece of open access infrastructure we support!
If you are interested in contributing to Programming Historian you can write a lesson, join their team of reviewers or provide feedback. We are also interested to hear from anyone at the University who has used this resource in their learning, teaching or research as example cases: lib-open-research@york.ac.uk
Dan Denis is a Lecturer in Psychology, having joined the University of York in 2022 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow. His primary research interest is understanding how we identify and prioritise key information in our environment so that we can remember important events. Dan is a member of the York Open Research Advocates network and the lead for the Open Science Interest Group which meets regularly to discuss practices in the Department of Psychology.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research really started upon learning about the replication crisis in Psychology, the finding that many influential studies could not be replicated. I started to think specifically about how these issues may arise in my own area of research, that focuses on the relationship between sleep and cognition. I realised that many of the challenges in this field (which include challenging data collection, small sample size, and issues of multiple comparisons and selective reporting of statistics) could be improved by engaging in open science practices.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One of the first challenges was how to organise my data for sharing. We record the brain activity of sleeping participants using a technique called electroencephalography which creates large and complex datasets. Previously I had given very little thought to how I organised my data, but when it came to uploading these data to a repository I found that it required the data to be stored according to a very specific standard (the Brain Imaging Data Structure, BIDS). Converting the data to the required specification was difficult and at times overwhelming. I learned a lot about the logic of designing file directories, and making your data as easy to understand as possible for both a human and a machine.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging in open research practices has given me a lot of skills that have supplemented my skills as a researcher. Learning about how to format data according to BIDS has given me a standard template for how to organise my data. While it was a very time intensive process the first time, the skills I learned meant that converting a second dataset to the BIDS standard was much faster. Now that I am knowledgeable about the standard data sharing template in my field, in my most recent experiments I have set things up so everything is saved according to the BIDS specification from the outset. I now have the data for almost all of my studies stored in the same format, which means that I have a much better understanding of my own data, and this has facilitated the sharing of data with the wider community much smoother.
Kirralise Hansford is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health within the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford and a 2025 Ambassador for Open Science at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Kirralise completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at York in 2024 and worked with the Library as an Open Research Graduate Engagement Lead for the Sciences. Her Open Research Journey reflects her perspectives at the beginning of this role.
What started your interest in open research?
When I was completing my MSc, I attended a lecture on open research practices and was confused about why this wasn’t just how research was done anyway. It made me sceptical about research that was not pre-registered, did not have open data, and that did not give adequate details for replication. I knew I wanted to work in research to expand our knowledge of sensory neuroscience and its applications to clinical populations, but I was only prepared to do this if I knew that my research practices would be open, replicable, and reproducible.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices
When starting my PhD, I wanted to do every study as a registered report, as I was sure this was the best way to do research. However, my supervisors were cautious of this approach given the lengthy process involved and the time constraints of a PhD. We agreed to do one of my studies in a registered report format, which was the first time any of us had done so. As they predicted, doing a registered report did take a long time. It even took a lot longer than they had expected, meaning that data collection was delayed until the final year of my PhD, which was not ideal! This process showed me that engaging in open research practices is not always easy, and if your research is quite exploratory and interdisciplinary, it can create additional barriers (in my case, a lengthy review process).
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Given the lengthy process of doing a registered report, I was able to fill my time with 2 additional projects that were not planned to be included within my PhD, and both projects gave me the opportunity to engage in new open research practices. For one project, I learnt how to make my research fully computationally reproducible. This process was tricky at times, but taught me some great coding and collaboration skills which are transferable to any new projects I undertake. The other project had a clinical focus, which allowed me to develop open research skills in public research dissemination.
The skills I have learnt through engaging with open research practices during my PhD have made me a better researcher. I now have a deeper understanding of how important it is to plan your research study before collecting data, how useful it is to have accessible and reproducible data and analyses scripts, and how vital it is to share the research outputs within the wider community.
Zlatomira (Zlati) Ilchovska is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology where her research interests include bi-/multilingualism and its role as a possible cognitive/brain protective life-long experience. She is passionate about open scholarship and doing and teaching better science, and received a York Open Research Award in 2025 as a member of the Feminist Wonderlab Collective. Zlati wrote about the foundation of this international ECR-led feminist research group in an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
During my undergraduate education in Psychology, I remember struggling to access published literature and experimental materials, as my university in Bulgaria did not have any journal subscription at the time. Much later, during my first months of the PhD at the University of Birmingham, I learned about the drive in science to preregister, preprint and share materials openly, and this completely changed my idea of research and academic work, providing me an opportunity to contribute to what I missed the most in my education.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
It is a steep learning curve in the beginning, and it takes time to get “converted” if one has never done any open science activities before, but once this happens, it becomes a fruitful learning process.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open scholarship helped me understand the gaps in my and others’ research, and made me a much stronger researcher in terms of planning methodology, analysing data and understanding the outcomes.
Alfie Lien-Talks is an AHRC-funded postgraduate researcher in digital archaeology, working in collaborative partnership with the Archaeology Data Service and Historic England. His research focuses on the reusability of archaeological datasets and explores how AI, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to improve data accessibility, integration, and interpretation in heritage research.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research and open data was sparked upon the realisation that, in the field of bioarchaeology, there is a limited amount of material available for scholarly inquiry. Acknowledging the finite nature of these resources, it becomes imperative for researchers to ensure maximal accessibility to existing data in order to fully leverage its academic impact. As archaeology is fundamentally concerned with elucidating the human past, broad data availability takes on an ethical dimension as well. Enabling comprehensive access to our ancestors’ stories has thus become a guiding principle propelling my commitment to open research practices and unfettered data sharing in my field.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Pursuing open research has presented complex challenges in navigating issues surrounding data privacy and ethical considerations. Achieving the appropriate balance between transparency and sensitive information protection has proven an intricate undertaking. However, grappling with these issues has ultimately reaffirmed the paramount importance of responsible and ethical approaches to data availability in scholarly work.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Adopting open research practices, particularly FAIR data sharing principles, has led to tangible scholarly benefits. Open availability of my work has allowed for wider dissemination and collaboration within both my core discipline and related fields. Embracing open data has also opened unanticipated interdisciplinary avenues, substantially enriching the reach and impact of my research. Overall, connectivity with the broader academic community has proven the most valuable aspect of open scholarship.
Andrew Mason is a Lecturer in the York Against Cancer funded Jack Birch Unit of Molecular Carcinogenesis, Department of Biology. His research has two main areas: characterising human urothelial carcinoma, and understanding the impacts of endogenous retrovirus interactions in avian and human cancers. Andrew is a longstanding member of the York Open Research Advocates network and also a Data Stewardship training fellow in the UK node of the pan-European Elixir organisation.
What started your interest in open research?
During my PhD I was trying to find and analyse as many diverse chicken whole genome sequencing datasets as possible. I quickly learned what informative metadata was (and wasn’t!) and that I would often need to discard technically high quality data if I wasn’t able to reliably annotate it. This was frustrating, so I made sure to make my shared data as clear and informative as possible.
These open research skills developed through my membership of chicken genome consortia (reference genome, pangenome and diversity) and as bioinformatic lead in the bladder cancer research and clinical partnership in the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. I wanted to find ways to embed these open research practices in Biology (rather than my experience of fumbling along), so I developed my skills further in an Elixir-UK Data Stewardship and Training Fellowship.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
The sensitive nature of data has always been a stumbling block for fully open data practices in my research. Initially this was because I was working on commercially-sensitive data from industry, but increasingly my work uses highly sensitive and (technically) identifiable human data. This is not just because we have clinical metadata for patients. Having full genome DNA sequence data is genuinely unique, and governments, health care and industry (pharma, insurance etc.) are still in a phase of understanding how that data should be managed, stored and utilised. This often means data is open but behind some kind of wall (i.e. a data access committee; DAC), or only accessible through a trusted research environment (TRE). This is still open practice, but many of us have experienced a DAC who limits access, or won’t even answer emails.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Fundamentally, following open research practices has improved my own record keeping, data management and dissemination of data. I always work imagining what someone else would make of my file structure or code! An unexpected benefit has been the positive impact on my teaching practice, as I have been able to augment Biology’s already fantastic materials for teaching data science to undergraduates and postgraduates, by incorporating research data management resources from my Elixir fellowship.
I’ve also found the wider open research and research data management community really welcoming and engaging – both at York and wider (UK and Europe) through Elixir.
Colleen Morgan is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology, and Director of the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab. She has an established international reputation as a leading scholar in critical digital archaeology and heritage. Colleen is a longstanding Open Research Advocate with an interest in supporting archaeology staff and students in considering open access publishing, open research, and general transparency in practice.
What started your interest in open research?
I began research blogging in 2002, chronicling my first archaeological field school as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Since that time I’ve continued to participate in most kinds of creative social media, such as Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and now TikTok. I’ve written quite a bit about science communication and was steeped in the Open Source/Open Access and Creative Commons movements through my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. With help, I founded “Then Dig” which was an Open Access, Open Peer Review archaeology journal, which ran for a few years until everyone became too busy to maintain it any longer. Since that time I’ve always ensured that my research is as open as possible–it is an even deeper ethos for archaeologists, as we destroy much of the contextual evidence around our data as we excavate, so it is imperative that we share this data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There are many countries where it is forbidden to openly share excavation data online or anywhere else before approvals from the government agencies. As a guest in these places, it is important to abide by these rules, or else you can lose your permit to excavate. This is true to a certain extent even in the UK, as sharing excavation locations can result in what are sometimes called “Nighthawks” that come and dig around in the site looking for treasure, or worse, human remains to collect and sell.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
I think engagement at the very beginning of social media raised my research profile beyond what it might have been without this sharing. I am happy that a community of researchers and science communicators were able to creatively experiment with ways to share their passion and enthusiasm for the past. There are better standards now for open data and the FAIR principles and in particular reuse has become much more prevalent, informing research such as the Avebury Papers, which was the digitisation, exploration and reuse of the archival materials associated with the Neolithic henge site of Avebury in Wiltshire. It is also a fundamental element of the Tetrarchs project, which aimed to reuse archaeological data to tell stories. Such projects are only the beginning; hopefully there will be a lot more work in this area in the near future.
Luqman Muraina is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, based in the Department of Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on the topic of decolonising development studies and teaching informed by alternative development epistemologies in Nigerian Universities. Since 2023 he has been an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Social Sciences, working with the Library and practitioners in his Faculty to develop training, advocacy and community-building initiatives.
What started your interest in open research?
There was an advertisement for an open research seminar during my Master’s program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. I found Open Research enticing, concerning how it presents an opportunity for a new research order, bringing the university closer to the community and ensuring that the outcomes of higher education public funding is immediately available for public consumption.
I was so inspired about the variety of open practices I could engage in my research, especially open data. Subsequently, I attended additional seminars on open licences, data management planning, etc. I immediately practised open data by depositing my qualitative data into the UCT’s repository (Zivahub), which was a rigorous yet pleasing process. I was encouraged by how others could use, cite, and adapt my data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Open research can sometimes become an extra task for a usually overwhelmed and busy researcher. In my experience of practising open data, I ensure to obtain consent from participants concerning making the data open, which can be sometimes difficult to get – requires further explanation. Similarly, the repository back-end personnel (at UCT) returned my qualitative data transcripts twice as not passing the anonymity practice, i.e., some details included in the data can be attributed to a specific person/group in which the research is attributed to. This proved time-consuming to fix.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open research aids scientific transparency and conformity to ethical guidelines. Transparency offers the opportunity to reduce the pressure to perform illegitimate and unethical scientific practice, i.e., data falsification, plagiarism, contracting, etc. If a research work is more accessible and data is openly available, there’s more consciousness on the part of the researcher to be transparent and ensure a just and fair research report and good practices. For example with open data, I took extra efforts in cleaning the data to ensure that the qualitative data do not include anything that makes inference to specific persons (including my participants), communities or groups.
Career wise, open research is also a means to get recognised for one’s hard work. For example, by publishing my data on a repository. means I can be cited both in traditional journal publications and also get my data cited independently.
Yorgos Paschos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, having recently completed a PhD in the Department of Archaeology researching the (sub)cultural heritage significance of grassroots music venues. During his time as a PGR he was an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities. Yorgos has also shared his reflections on preparing to publish his PhD thesis open access as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began during my PhD work in Grassroots Music Venues and cultural heritage, where accessibility and inclusivity are critical. I quickly realised that open research not only democratises knowledge but also allows for broader collaboration, especially with non-academic communities. A turning point that boosted my interest in open research was my involvement in the Archive: All Areas exhibition, where I saw firsthand how open access to research could empower communities to engage with their local music heritage. This experience underscored the transformative potential of open research to connect academia with real-world impact.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One challenge has been navigating the technical aspects of open research, such as understanding the different licensing options or identifying the best platforms for open-access publishing. Additionally, I’ve found that raising awareness about open research often requires clear communication to address questions or uncertainties. These experiences have taught me the importance of providing accessible resources and creating supportive environments to help others adopt open practices more confidently.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has had several positives for me, both professionally and personally. It has broadened the reach of my work, allowing me to connect with audiences outside academia, including policymakers and community groups. Open research has also fostered collaborations I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, as it breaks down barriers between disciplines and institutions.
Joe Spearing is a Research Fellow with the Health and Social Care Policy group in Centre for Health Economics. His research interests include disability benefits, mental health and working conditions, the health and social care workforce and demand and supply of social care. Joe is also an Open Research Advocate and ECR Representative member of the Open Research Strategy Group, which provides guidance and direction for open research activities at the University of York.
What started your interest in open research?
For me, open research is about equity and rigor. I became interested in open research because significant advances have been made in Economics by the use of replication packages and sharing of code, where researchers have been able to identify and correct coding errors. We have a lot further to go in building the infrastructure which would allow us to confidently share code and promote norms around publishing replication packages, but doing so potentially improves the reliability of our quantitative results. I’m interested in finding ways to further this.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
I see two major challenges around open research for quantitative social scientists: the first is our norms of sharing and giving feedback on code before publication. Before I submit an article to a journal it has typically been read by multiple people who have given feedback on it, but as a discipline we check each other’s code much less often, and even then it is mostly for “accuracy” rather than readability. Shifting norms is difficult, but there are a lot of people, including at York, working to try to do this.
Secondly, using replication files is often understood as something of an adversarial activity: early career researchers are often frightened of sharing their code widely for fear of exposing an embarrassing mistake. This relates partly to the reality that a lot of time the code has not been checked extensively by others, and also to academia’s often competitive culture.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
For me, open research has been an invitation to take my own empirical research more seriously: to think about my analysis code as a tool for wider consumption rather than just for delivering results; and to begin to build my capacity to write code which is more easily understandable for a wider audience. I think it has improved my workflow and my confidence in my results. I hope to engage further with efforts to build a greater culture of sharing and giving feedback on work before publication, which I hope will build my confidence in my work.
Katie Vernon is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Centre for Medieval Studies, whose research focuses on arms and armour in Middle English romance. She is an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities, sharing her passion for access to higher education and working with both academic and external organisations to make research available to the wider public. Katie has also shared her experiences of publishing an open access book chapter as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began through my love of heritage and longstanding involvement in educational outreach. I wanted to share research that I found exciting and through my time volunteering in digital heritage I realised just how much information is out there waiting to be put online and read. I have recently been thrilled to see how far reaching the impact of open research is with engaging different communities across academia, heritage and the public; for instance, publishing a review of an exhibition at the Royal Armouries in ‘Aspectus’ has led to an invitation to lead a public workshop.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There have been a few challenges for engaging in open research practices. Firstly, producing written work to share research with different audiences has been challenging; this includes changing reading level when working with heritage groups but also changing subject-specific jargon when working with scholars in different fields. Which brings me onto my second challenge, of finding pockets of scholars who are engaged in publishing open research in my field. I have found that the best way to navigate this issue has been to take an increasingly interdisciplinary view, collaborating with scholars in fields very different from my own.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has really opened my eyes to the different ways in which research can be shared, and I have been pleasantly surprised to see how open research principles are increasingly gaining traction. It has enabled me to join new communities of researchers from across different institutions and disciplines. It has also allowed me to think about my research in a new light, and I have been able to develop ideas further through thinking about how I might frame them to different audiences and what impact my work can have on different groups.
Credits
Open Research Journeys were originally published in the internal Open Research Newsletter between December 2023 and June 2025. We would like to thank each of the contributors for sharing their insights and our Graduate Engagement Leads, Kirralise Hansford, Melissa Kays, Luqman Muraina, Yorgos Paschos and Katie Vernon, for initiating and helping to deliver this project.
This resource is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike International 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The statement, developed collaboratively by senior leaders across the N8 universities including Library Directors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Research, and Vice-Chancellors, sets out five key commitments:
Exploring shared infrastructure and supporting enhanced green open access proactively through institutional repositories
Investing in non-profit tools and platforms that support open research and transparent publishing
Engaging researchers in conversations about the impact of their publishing choices
Sharing best practices with the wider library and research sector
Championing a positive research culture through open access, responsible metrics, and inclusive infrastructure
Alongside the publication of the statement in June, Professor Charlie Jeffery, University of York Vice-Chancellor and President and previous Chair of the N8 Research Partnership, commented:
For too long, we’ve seen the consolidation of scholarly publishing into the hands of a few major commercial players whose priorities are increasingly divorced from the academic communities they were meant to serve.
Our researchers are delivering work that will help improve the world around us. They then review and edit this work – often without compensation – and yet institutions are charged both to publish and to access this knowledge. The balance has tipped too far, and we hope this statement represents a first step towards the N8 working with publishers to develop a different approach that will benefit all parties.
Professor Charlie Jeffrey discusses how the N8 is exploring new infrastructures to speed up access to knowledge
Launch event
York Law School and Department of Sociology
On 12 June 2025 we welcomed colleagues from across and beyond the N8 to the York Law School and Department of Sociology for Pathways to sustainable scholarly publishing. The event was opened by Professor Sarah Thompson, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, who declared that the launch of the new statement represented a moment to be proud of the N8 and an opportunity to celebrate the collaborations that enable the collective’s libraries to be pro-active and forward thinking.
Sarah outlined that an active conversation with publishers is particularly critical at this moment in time due to the acute financial challenges universities are facing. She described the statement as an extremely welcome intervention from the N8, affirming as it does its members’ commitment to collaborating and influencing the future of sustainable scholarly publishing.
Further context to the launch of the statement was then provided by Kirsty Lingstadt, Director of Library, Learning, Archives and Wellbeing:
Following the N8’s Rights Retention activity in 2023, we looked at what we could do next. Scholarly publishing was in a difficult place, and there were certain challenges thrown into sharp relief by the financial situation facing the sector. Scholarly publishing is a core part of the research, infrastructure and eco-system that we find ourselves in but we’re increasingly having to make difficult choices due to rising costs. As such, making open access available to all has become harder and harder as we’ve moved along.
Professor Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian at the University of Manchester and chair of the N8 Library Directors’ Group, delivered a succinct summary of what the N8’s statement hopes to achieve before the event’s first panel discussion, chaired by Anna Clements, Director of Library Services and University Librarian at the University of Sheffield. Participants were Anna Vernon, Head of Research Licensing at Jisc and Sara Ball, Strategy Lead for Open Science, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), who shared insights on the national approaches being taken to drive efficiency and deliver value for money in scholarly publishing.
L-R: Sara Ball, Anna Vernon, Professor Christopher Pressler
The second panel session was chaired by Sarah Thompson, Associate Director of Libraries, Archives and Learning Services. This session featured presentations from three scholarly publishers who have already made strategic commitments to supporting open science and introducing sustainable open access business models, reflecting the missions of their parent organisations and societies. The panel were Dr Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities, and Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London, Clare Curtis, Director of Content and Engagement at the Biochemical Society/Portland Press, and Chris Bennett, Global Commercial Director at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
Dr Caroline Edwards reflected on the work of the Open Library of Humanities and recently-announced Open Journals Collective:
We’re not reinventing the wheel – we are just consolidating what already exists. We are asking for libraries to consider our journals as part of their collections budgets, rather than as marginal within library budgets. More than this, we are asking librarians to help us craft the future of scholarly journals publishing. We’re going to build a better alternative to transformative agreements because, as discussed today, they are fundamentally inequitable.
L-R: Clare Curtis, Chris Bennett, Dr Caroline Edwards, Sarah Thompson
The event wrapped up with a final panel session on research communication and civic engagement, chaired by Andrew Barker, Director of Library Services & Learning Development at Lancaster University. Before beginning the session, Andrew paid a warm tribute to his colleague and friend Elaine Sykes, Head of Open Research at Lancaster University, whose sudden and unexpected death was confirmed earlier that week.
The subsequent discussion centered around the efforts and challenges of creating a more inclusive, accessible, and representative research culture within academia. It featured contributions by Dr Emma Yhnell, Reader and Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, College of Biomedical and Life Sciences at Cardiff University, and two researchers from York, Dr Clau Nader, Research Associate in the Department of Health Sciences, and Dr Kate Lancaster, Lecturer in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology.
The panel discussed the systemic barriers in academia, especially the pressure to conform to outdated metrics such as publishing in high-impact journals. In a fitting end to the day, our final panelists agreed that change often starts with a few brave voices, encouraging collective momentum toward a more just and inclusive research and publishing environment.
L-R: Dr Kate Lancaster, Dr Clau Nader, Dr Emma Yhnell and Andrew Barker
N8 collated the following conclusions in their recap of the event:
Growing consensus across stakeholders – Speakers from academia, libraries, funders and publishers all expressed support for more transparent, cost-effective, and inclusive publishing models. This cross-sector agreement reflects momentum toward systemic change.
Challenges with commercial publishers and metrics – Multiple speakers pointed to ongoing issues: rising costs, reliance on prestige metrics, and publisher opacity around pricing. These challenges disproportionately affect underfunded institutions and researchers, reflecting the importance of the N8’s intervention.
Emerging alternatives and transition models – Promising alternatives are being implemented, such as The Open Journals Collective, that aim to shift the cost burden away from individual researchers and toward community-supported, nonprofit-driven systems.
Lola Furniss reflects on her curation project: ‘Visibility and Resistance: A Curation Honouring the Lives of Working-Class Women in England, 20th Century to Present’, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrell library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.
Lola Furniss standing in front of the display of books that are part of her curation.
Reflecting upon this curation process, I am compelled by the undertaking of this task as both an intellectually rigorous and profoundly personal endeavour. At its core, the project sought to centre the narratives of working-class women in England from the twentieth century to the present, with an explicit emphasis on intersectionality. While the curation cannot claim to be exhaustive, it aspires to initiate an enduring diversification of the University of York’s library spaces and to reinforce the presence of working-class women’s voices in academic and cultural spaces.
Intersectionality remains at the forefront of decolonising approaches to curation. As theorised by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality illuminates the ways in which systems of oppression, such as patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, and xenophobia interweave and operate to produce compounded forms of marginalisation. Applied here, it prevents the reductive treatment of class or gender as isolated categories, instead recognising how these identities implicate others, including race, sexuality, and ability. This approach tailored the selection process, ensuring the materials reflect the multiplicity of working-class women’s lived realities. In doing so, the curation attempts to resist homogenisation, foregrounding the intersecting structures that both constrain and ignite resistance across different historical and cultural contexts.
During this process, I have explored the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes a valuable archival or scholarly resource. I have included foundational works such as Pamela M. Graves’s Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 and Elizabeth Roberts’s A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 to provide essential historical context. Though, in addition, I included Juno Roche’s A Working-Class Family Ages Badly and Sabeena Akhtar’s edited collection Cut from the Same Cloth? Muslim Women on Life in Britain, and Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns to accentuate the intersectional dimensions of identity, articulated directly by working-class authors. The inclusion of zines, addressed in a dedicated section of the reading list, alongside cultural histories like Selina Todd’s Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution and community-based works such as Speak Out!: A Brixton Black Women’s Group Reader facilitated a multidimensional engagement with the lived realities and artistic protest by working-class women. This approach highlights the value of platforming the complexity of working-class experiences, communicating a powerful, prideful embodiment of resistance.
Close up of Lola’s display
Additionally, in my research I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the features of online archives and websites, with distinctive efforts to support independent publishers and amplify online histories that can be difficult to locate. I also drew upon recommendations from other universities undertaking similar initiatives to diversify their collections, as well as materials from the York and Leeds public libraries. These external resources yielded a wide range of compelling materials that broadened and enriched the curation as a collective body of work.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, there is an impressive political import inherent within the act of curation, making it an imperative task to avoid reductive or inaccurate portrayals of working-class women. This project reinforced the fundamental obligation to foster spaces within academic institutions that validate working-class women’s narratives as crucial to both intellectual discourse and activism. Ultimately, without the women highlighted in this curation, the plight for change would lack critical historical continuity, knowledge through experience, and the perspectives necessary to acknowledge and advance the emancipation against oppressive systemic hierarchies.
View of Lola’s and Angharad’s displays.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the University Library team for their unwavering support and expertise throughout this project. Their guidance was invaluable in navigating the logistical and technical considerations necessary for bringing the curation to fruition, both within the library’s physical display and the LibGuide. I am particularly thankful to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for their meaningful and constructive guidance during our meetings, and for their dedication to the success of the project; to Kenny and the purchasing team for facilitating the acquisition of my newly selected materials; to Ned for his careful assistance with social media promotion; to Laura and Lydia for their contributions and recommendations with the archival material; to Ben for his willingness to stick with me throughout my many copyright queries; and to Steph and Siobhan for their patience and essential guidance during the LibGuide creation process. The generosity, warmth, and care of each member of the team have been integral to my productivity and execution of this task. I am also indebted to my family for their insight on the topic, for sharing working-class struggle and protest stories throughout my life, and for compelling me to engage thoughtfully with the topics and intricacies of systemic oppression.
Lola and Angharad standing in front of their curation displays.
Looking forward, I envisage this curation as a living collection that invites continual interaction and development by future scholars and students. I hope that it contributes to sustained efforts to create intersectional library collections that are more inclusive, nuanced, and representative. Most importantly, I hope it inspires ongoing critical inquiry into the ways working-class women’s stories are told, preserved, and valued. I encourage you to explore the collection, engage with its materials, and cardinally, contribute to the ongoing work of expanding working-class visibility within academic and cultural spheres. Thank you for your attention, and for taking time out of your day to interact with my curation!
A picture of the whole curation display, featuring two posters, books at varied heights with corresponding blurbs, open poetry books, and QR codes to different media.
I am feeling incredibly bittersweet about my time as a Student Curator coming to an end. I have loved working on this curation, and it has felt incredibly gratifying to pull it all together with the digital Libguide and physical display in the library. I feel as though I have had this curation brewing in the back of my mind for a while, and being given the resources to actually create it has been incredible. I finally got to put my incredibly niche goodreads shelving system to good use!
However, my issue is I really do not want to stop working on this curation. Disability and neurodiversity are quite key to my self identity, and so I consume a lot of content in all forms around it. It is really hard to now turn off my curation brain when I see something on youtube or my for you page, thinking ‘let me just add this’! I hope that this curation keeps living on, with people adding to the curation padlet and sharing their own Disabled joy as well as that featured in the curation.
Setting up the physical display was incredibly fun, and it was great getting to organise it spatially to reflect how my research was carried out. If you visit it in person, you’ll see that there are books, but also little signs with QR codes to videos, art, articles, and ebooks. Lots of these are put in a spot deliberately; such as Alice Wong’s interview QR code going next to her memoir. I really hope that this makes the physical display fun to explore. I have also included a QR code to the Hannah Gadsby standup on my libguide, but don’t blame me if you are laughing next to the Burton.
I have aimed to make the physical display as easy and accessible to peruse as possible. There are ebook versions of physical books/standalone ebooks where possible to allow for reading aloud and changing formats, I have included a wide range of text difficulty, and included social media accounts for low effort perusing. I wanted to make sure there were materials for all spoon levels!
I also wanted to make the physical display and online libguide as similar experiences as possible, so you won’t be disadvantaged if you can’t physically get to the library to view the curation. All the videos and artwork you can view at the physical display are on the libguide. The only thing you need to be in the library for is to borrow the physical books.
On the actual content of the curation, it has definitely shifted from my initial thoughts. I definitely did not expect to find as much incredible poetry as I did, and was incredibly excited by how much Disabled, anti capitalist, political thought I found. I did expect to find many memoirs, and initially I was quite set against not including them. My perception was that Disabled people are often only published in memoirs, as a way to package up Disability and sell it to an abled audience as inspiration. However (from scouring many Goodreads reviews) I believe all the memoirs selected for this curation are incredibly valuable and we can definitely get joy from them too. I really liked the wording of Judith Heumann’s; ‘the unrepentant memoir of a Disability Rights Activist’, and Harriet McBryde Johnson’s ‘Too Late to Die Young’ seems to really stem from a joy for living life being Disabled. Rebekkah Taussig’s memoir ‘Sitting Pretty’ aims to directly refute the media’s one dimensional portrayal of Disability. I therefore thought it would be a disservice to exclude these authors simply for their genre.
The memoir section of the curation is along the back row. Loosely defined as Alice Wong’s memoir sits in the Alice Wong section (I am a bit of a fan…)
Overall, I have strived to include diverse perspectives in the curation. Disability and Neurodiversity are incredibly broad topics themselves, and it was especially necessary to curate an intersectional reading list as experience of Disability is undeniably shaped by race, gender, sexuality, and background. Queer of colour organising is, and has always been, at the heart of the Disability Rights and later Disability Joy movement. I hope I have managed to capture that in my curation.
When purchasing books for my curation, I sometimes struggled with the question ‘is this joyful enough?’. This was particularly true for some books detailing traumatic events, such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poetry collection Tonguebreaker. I generally ended up including them, as it would feel dishonest to completely ignore any mention of hardship. Tonguebreaker details surviving hatecrime and other traumatic events, and in the midst of it all finding love. I think that encapsulates the theme for me; our resilience and joy in community.
While setting up the physical display, someone came over to talk about her son’s potential ADHD, and whether I had any recommendations. We had a really lovely conversation and it really proved to me the importance of Disabled and neurodivergent spaces and visibility.
This photo shows books from Alice Wong and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. There are QR codes to art and articles linking to the various books, an ebook, and Leah’s poetry collection Tonguebreaker is open.
Finally, I could not have done this curation without help from a brilliant team of people. Thank you to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for your help and support. Thank you to Ned for posting my many instagram stories, and Ben for answering my many questions about copyright. Steph and Siobhan were incredibly helpful in all things libguides and HTML coding. And thank you to Jessica for setting us up with reading lists!
Meet the student curator: Hello, I’m Angharad, a third year integrated masters Biology student. I am Disabled, and since coming to University I have really enjoyed carving out a queer, Disabled, neurodivergent community for myself. I hope that my curation, which will include interactive elements, furthers a sense of belonging within the York Disabled community. I aim to highlight art, literature, film, and media made about us, and for us, focusing on joy and liberation to uplift Disabled voices, which are so often left out of the conversation. I also want to encourage non-disabled staff and students to engage with art and media made by Disabled people, and challenge any preconceived notions they may have.
Reframing the conversation I believe focusing on Disabled joy and community is increasingly important in the wake of recent events. Changes to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by the government are dehumanizing and ignorant at best, with the Department for Work and Pensions stating PIP fraud is 0.0%, resulting in Disabled people being used as political football. This has emboldened think pieces and hate on social media, with people questioning the validity of random strangers’ disabilities, and framing a person’s worth by whether they can work in a broken, ableist, capitalist system. On the other hand, more ‘positive’ Disability representation is often from the angle of inspiration and ‘overcoming’ their disability, focusing on Disabled people for non-disabled people to marvel at. Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai tells the story of Sins Invalid, a disability justice and art activism performance project. Reading this was incredibly inspiring to me; it stresses Disabled, queer, nonbinary, bodyminds of colour existing in a space for themselves is radical in and of itself. Our joy is a form of resistance. Reading how members of Sins Invalid support and accommodate each other was joyful, and my aim with my curation is to evoke that emotion in the community here in York.
The importance of Disabled visibility and joy Those who aren’t white, cis, or straight have an undeniably different experience of Disability to those who are, and are often at the forefront of the Disabled joy and radical acceptance movement. Platforming voices often marginalised and underrepresented is incredibly important, and something I aim to do with my curation. Only a few weeks into my curation, I have found so many examples of Disabled joy which I am excited to share. I already feel more part of the community, and empathise with Alice Wong in her book Disability Visibility, talking about how she collected stories of Disabled people in clippings in newspapers; “In surrounding myself with these stories, I found and developed my own voice.” Alice founded the Disability Visibility Project, an oral history collection of Disabled people. She writes that the stories she collected do not seek to explain, inspire, or provoke empathy, but to just show Disabled people existing, including with joy.
This encapsulates just how important it is to see Disabled people existing unapologetically and demanding accommodations, rather than fitting into uncomfortably abled boxes. With this curation, I hope to amplify Disabled joy, and foster a sense of Disabled community within the University.
In the meantime, I hope that you find some Disabled and neurodivergent joy in these titles, which are already available in the library, and will feature in my curation once it is published.
Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. A celebration of Disabled community, highlighting radical love, power, and resilience of Disabled queer people of colour. Currently available in the library as an ebook
Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong. A curation of essays celebrating Disabled culture. Focusing on hope and love, this book highlights the everyday lives, passions, and talents of those in the community. Available in the library as a hard copy
Hello, I am Lola! I am a third-year English Literature student born in Sheffield and raised in San Francisco. I am deeply passionate about how narratives are cultivated: how and what information is curated, canonised, or omitted entirely. I am invigorated by the opportunity to burgeon a wider class consciousness at the university and its facilities through the lives and narratives of working-class women from the 20th century to present, placing imperative emphasis on intersectionality.
During my study at the University of York, the need for greater working-class visibility in academic spaces has become apparent. These observations have shaped my desire to help foster a library environment that acknowledges and honours the complex, intersectional identities within the working class.
As someone from a working-class background, shaped by generations of strong working-class women, this curation encapsulates a desire to represent and honour the lives and stories that have informed my own. With the curation topic’s persistent relevance, I wish to amplify the narratives, complexities, communities, and resistance of working-class women through literature, art, and media. During this process, I will be curating an array of materials from the University Library, with additional diverse media beyond traditional literary forms. By including theatre, oral histories, protest ephemera, songs and chants, community engagement, and museum exhibitions, this curation will embrace forms that diverge from traditional academic boundaries. These stories act not singularly as records, but also as abundant sources of cultural, intellectual, and emotional insight.
A badge held at The Feminist Library
Why Read Working-Class Narratives?
In discussions of power and representation, those who get to tell their story, and those who do not, are central to this curation’s visibility efforts. Today, contemporary working-class authors are flourishing, so to platform their narratives during such cultural momentum is both necessary and appropriate.
Literature offers an intimate encounter between reader and narrative voice, highlighting an essential element of visibility for, in this context, working-class women. There is a unique accessibility granted by diverse narrative mediums, enabling marginalised voices to be understood and heard with depth and personality. Working-class women have been at the forefront of resistance, creativity, and survival, yet with minimal opportunity to infiltrate dominant literary and academic discourses, their stories are often overlooked. By engaging with such narratives, the reader is able to interact with alternative societal perspectives, ones that consider the politics of labour, domesticity, migration, poverty, motherhood, and resistance. These narratives challenge structural oppressors, and reveal much about the material conditions of daily life and the lived realities for many.
Why Now?
In an era of fraught economic conditions and ever-expanding inequality, the voices of working-class women provide tremendous insight and lived truths. Amid cost of living crises, reductions of public services, housing instability, and amplified class divides, such narratives expose the impact of systemic intricacies along the intersecting lines of class, gender identity, race, and ability. I wish to emphasise individuals, their narratives, their voices of resistance, with such engagement serving as an act of recognition and political engagement, essential in the plight for visibility. This curation acts both on behalf of platforming underrepresented voices, but also as a deep admiration for the transformative nature inherent in the works. In centring working-class women’s narratives, this project will attempt to reaffirm their cultural and political significance; and contribute to an increasing representation, and diversification of the library’s presented material.
An Enduring Curation:
I aspire to curate a project that foregrounds a class-conscious, intersectional perspective within feminism that highlights narratives and existences often overlooked in media and literary discourse. I aim to assemble a thoughtful, transformative body of work that reflects the lived experiences of working-class intersectional marginalisation. I understand there are limitations, but such ignites an extended invitation to my peers, with hopes of an ongoing student engagement. I aim to create a curation that may begin with me here at the university library, but lives on through reinterpretation and further development to establish a dynamic, democratic collection for students in the future. Curation, to me, is a political and creative act, one that has the power to disrupt dominant narratives and empower those who resonate, and those who are allied in the cause. I want my internship project to exemplify this ethos while honouring the trust placed in me as its curator. I hope that the curated material presented will at the very least scratch the surface of such robust narratives, with the aim of introducing you to ideas, people, and experiences you may have not encountered yet. In granting this visibility, I encourage my peers to continue this exploration, championing engagement with working-class narratives of all kinds.
Ruth Elder (Collections Management Specialist) outlines how the Library has developed a methodology to promote University of York research theses to a global audience through the use of Wikidata.
Wikidata and White Rose eTheses Online logos
Wikidata is part of the Wikimedia family and acts as a central store for the shared data of Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Wikidata can be read and edited by both humans and machines, can be interlinked with other open data sets on the linked data web, and (in part) populates Google knowledge graphs, digital assistants and Wikipedia information boxes with information harvested from Wikidata. University of York doctoral dissertations reflect the original, independent research of the institution, and are available digitally through White Rose eTheses Online (WREO.)
By creating entries on Wikidata with unique identifiers for each thesis title, author and associated doctoral supervisor(s) this information becomes available as part of the linked open data ecosystem. Links are created between individual entries to express relationships and connections, and the author and title entries signpost directly to the WREO digital entry.
In addition to displaying the “internal” relationships, the data within Wikidata is available to inform a range of external knowledge systems. One example of this is Scholia, a tool based on Wikidata information which creates visual scholarly profiles for topics, people and organizations using bibliographic and other information sources from Wikidata (example: Matthew Collins Q17386345).
A second example is EntiTree with the tagline – “bringing the data closer to the users.” This is as an “academic family tree”, visualising the relationships between generations of doctoral supervisors and students (example: Richard F Paige Q102303862).
Screenshot of results for query “which University of York theses have been cited by others?”
Of course the information has to be listed in Wikidata to be included in the result. Over 3,611 doctoral theses awarded between 1966 – 2025 are currently listed on Wikidata and the total is increasing all the time. Analysis indicates that the addition of doctoral information to Wikidata is resulting in directing users to WREO, supporting the library objective of making our content as open as possible, and supporting the commitment of the University of York as an institution for the public good.
For more information about this project, contact Ruth Elder
Faculty Engagement Manager Ned Potter offers ten tips for academics getting started on the Bluesky social network
Many academics and researchers have chosen to leave Twitter / X due to recent events, and one of the places they’re sharing ideas instead is Bluesky. For those not familiar with this platform, it is extremely Twitter-like in look and feel but with exponentially less toxicity – and it has recently doubled its number of users in a very short period of time, in fact adding more than 1 million users in the last week alone.
There is a growing University of York community on Bluesky (more on how to find this community below), and if you’d like to be part of it read on: this guide is for you. It’s worth noting that the official word from the University is that staff are welcome to set up and maintain personal social media accounts related to their work, provided that their use conforms with the University’s social media policy – best to ensure you have read the policy before setting up a new Bluesky account.
Throughout this guide I’ve quoted various York academics, and it seems appropriate to start with this advice from Dr Richard Carter (School of ACT):
Don’t be afraid of starting out again. If you have a sizeable following on Twitter-X, the prospect of shifting to a significantly smaller audience on BlueSky might appear very discouraging. Nevertheless… rebuilding on a fresher, far less toxic platform offers us a chance to reconnect with the core audience of professionals that we always intended to reach and be in dialogue with.
Here, then, are ten top tips for those ready to rebuild.
1. Fill out your profile BEFORE you start following people
A trap many ‘Newsky’ people fall into is looking up their peers and friends and following them on the platform, before setting up their own profile: picture, bio, link etc. The issue is that accounts with generic avatars and no biography or introductory text are often perceived as likely to be bots, so users not only eschew following them back but they may even automatically block – meaning the chance to engage in dialogue is gone.
Put in a bio of some sort, and an avatar: it doesn’t have to be a picture of you. As Dr Jeremy Moulton (Department of Politics and International Relations) says: “…immediately write your bio and then post an ‘I’m here!’ post that sets out your interests and what’s brought you onto the app. For me, it was to say I was interested in environmental politics and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, for example.”
2. Adapt for – and enjoy – the lack of algorithm
Bluesky is very Twitter-like in lots of functional ways: you can post up to 300 characters at a time, you can repost, you can Like, and so on.
The Bluesky interface
The crucial difference is the lack of algorithm – the lack of endlessly auto-refreshing content, showing you things you didn’t ask to be shown. Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed is simply the posts from the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. That’s it.
It takes some time to readjust to proactively seeking out posts and people to engage with, but it’s well worth doing. When you’re new, if you don’t get out there and follow a bunch of people, your feed will be completely dead; with that in mind, as Dr Lucy Grigoryan (Department of Psychology) says: “It’s worth following a lot of people – more so than on twitter, it really changes the whole experience” – so how do you find people to follow?
There are several ways but let’s start with the most York-specific.
3. Follow the University of York Bluesky Starter Pack
Consisting primarily of academics at York, along with some professional services staff and departments who have created presences on the platform, this pack is the easiest way to connect with colleagues from the off. Two things are worth noting here: you can follow the whole pack and then unfollow / weed as you go along (you’re not obliged to follow all of the accounts, forever), and if you would like to be added to this pack please let us know! The easiest ways to get added is to ask the library on Bluesky itself (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) or send me an email (ned.potter) if you’d prefer.
4. Find other useful starter packs
“One of the best things you can do when starting out on BlueSky is to curate your experience from the get-go: look up different feeds of interest, follow those you’re interested in, follow anyone interesting ‘they’ are following, and take advantage of the new starter packs to rapidly follow the activities of people in related areas of interest / work. It will take a little while to organise, but it’s worth it,” says Richard Carter.
As well as the York starter pack there’s an entire Directory of Starter Packs available, allowing you to search by keyword to see if your discipline is represented. If you’re still looking for people to follow after searching the directory and taking all of Richard’s advice above, you can use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter if you wish to.
5. Get up to speed with custom feeds
Whilst a Starter Pack is a useful tool, it is also a fairly blunt one – you follow a group of users united under some sort of thematic umbrella, but you see all of their posts (about any subject). A slightly more subtle device, well worth getting on board with, is the Custom Feed: a curated set of posts on a theme, rather than merely a set of users, which you can view whether you follow the people posting to the Feed or not.
Posters can use emojis or hashtags to tag posts to appear in the feed, depending on how the feed is set up; usually you will need to ask the creator of the feed to add you to the list of eligible posters if you wish to actively participate, but anyone can view and follow a custom feed.
Prof Colin Beale (Department of Biology) says “Finding, following and requesting being added to feeds that are relevant to your research and then tagging posts for those feeds appropriately is very helpful” and in fact using custom feeds was the most often cited piece of advice amongst the academics I spoke to about Bluesky, with Dr Emilie Murphy and Professor Jennie Batchelor among others flagging it.
Pavlos Vasilopoulos (Department of Politics) specifically recommends the polisky feed for those interested in political science; there’s an AcademicSky feed for general HE chatter, a PhDSky feed for and by PhD Students, and so on. Search for feeds in Bluesky via the Feeds menu (hit the # button down the left-hand side of the home screen on desktop, or top right of the home tab on the mobile app) and you’ll see any feeds you already follow, plus a search box under ‘Discover New Feeds’.
The Feeds tab
6. Be proactive. Like, reply, engage
All those clichés about how you get out what you put in really apply here. You have to go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. One the tips from Dr Terry Hathaway (Norwegian Study Centre) is simply “…engaging in conversations rather than focusing on posting some branded message out into the void.”
Dr. Sophie Coulombeau advocates a mix of the professional and the personal if you feel able: “…blend self-promotion (‘Thrilled to announce…’) with other stuff around hobbies, interests, and boosting the work of others, if you feel comfortable doing so.”
7. Don’t just post links to your articles, post mini-threads highlighting your findings
More than one academic I spoke to advocates using Bluesky to discuss research papers rather than merely linking to them. Here’s how Colin Beale puts it: “As a general rule posts that just say “We’ve got a great new paper here, read it” don’t really work – but explaining in a short thread the key findings is a much more effective way of engaging.”
8. The follower numbers are lower but the engagement is higher
Several users who maintain presences on both X and Bluesky report that engagement is much higher on the latter: in fact a comparison by Andrew Dressler found engagement was 10 times greater on Bluesky:
as an experiment, I posted the same post to twitter and bluesky. here is the time series of engagements (sum of comments, reposts, likes) from the two platforms.Note that I have 39K followers on twitter and 7K here, so engagement per follower here is more than 10 times higher here on bluesky.
Furthermore Katharine Hayhoe reported that not only was the level of engagement considerably higher on Bluesky, the nature of the responses was much more positive too.
There was an even bigger difference in the comments received. All on Threads and all but one here were positive, constructive, or neutral (one person was just being a jerk, not a troll). Only 18% on X were positive or neutral. The rest were negative, many highly so.
In short, don’t be put off by the idea of starting again with a smaller network.
9. Make the most of Bluesky’s powerful moderation tools
Good moderation and the ability to control who you interact with has been baked into Bluesky from the start, and it makes such a difference. Dr Sabine Clarke (Department of History) says “I do a lot of pre-emptive blocking. When people follow me now who appear to have no interests in common, or seem a bit random, I just block them.”
When you block someone they are gone completely: if they leave a comment on your post and you block them, you won’t see the comment and no one else will see the comment either. If someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs so they’re no longer associated. Not only that, you can subscribe to blocklists (e.g. this one) which really do starve problematic groups of the oxygen they need. It’s basically the opposite of Twitter.
As well as the nuclear block option, you can also use the mute function to moderate your own experience of the platform. Richard Carter says, “…if there are topics and discourses that you could very much do without seeing regularly, it can be an invaluable tool. I’ve compiled a veritable ‘devil’s dictionary’ of words to help bring a sense of personalised calm to my various feeds.”
10. Bluesky can be better than Twitter, but give it time
Bluesky is often seen as a Twitter replacement but it doesn’t have to be only that – it can take the good things from that platform and leave some of the bad things behind to make something better. In particular, engaging the trolls and quote-posting the terrible takes – all of that is not necessary on Bluesky, especially when the Block button is so effective.
The accessibility is better too: I’d recommend accessing Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked ‘Require alt-text before posting’ and you can create accessible content every time. You can also add alt-text (and indeed captions) to videos – finally a social network which offers this… Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.
As we’ve seen above the engagement rate is already higher than Twitter – and the academic and Higher Education communities are really starting to build up on the platform. A strong York presence will only enhance that. You may not get instant results on Bluesky, but it’s worth putting in the time. And remember, if you do end up joining the platform after reading this, let us know so we can add you to the York starter pack… Join us!
Bonus tip for departments: speak to Central Communications before you start!
If you are considering creating a new Bluesky account to represent a School, Department or other University Service or subsidiary, please get in touch with the University’s Central Communications team before you get started at communications-support@york.ac.uk. There’s more information on what the Communications team will cover with you on the University’s Social Media For Staff page, including account ownership and security.
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.
