PhD – STUART LAWSON

Update – my final thesis is now available: Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons.

An earlier version as originally submitted for examination is also available: Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons. I passed the viva and subsequent revisions have been accepted, so the final version is slightly different.

I have recently completed a PhD in the politics of open access at Birkbeck, University of London, supervised by Martin Eve and Caroline Edwards who are the co-founders of Open Library of Humanities.

Being open with my own research is an important part of my practice so I always make sure journal articles and data are available and openly licensed. Opening up the content in this way is relatively simple – opening up the process is more complex, particularly for a thesis.

The style of a humanities thesis poses a challenge when it comes to sharing early stages of the work. My topic was interdisciplinary and cuts across various areas of the humanities and social sciences. It takes the form of a single long argument woven together from numerous strands. During the three years of writing many aspects of this argument changed significantly and since the only formal output of the research is the final text, earlier versions are sometimes very different.

Early drafts of either the full text or a given chapter are inherently incomplete and not yet fully thought through. They contain mistakes, incomplete lines of thought, unclear connections, and perhaps valuable ideas which later become less relevant to the final work. With these disclaimers in mind I have posted occasional updates on this page throughout the three years of completing the thesis for anyone who was interested in seeing how the work was progressing.

The following are drafts of individual chapters:

Chapter 1: Access to Knowledge – Academic Publishing

Chapter 2: Access to Knowledge – Universities and Libraries

Chapter 3: Understanding Openness

Chapter 4: Neoliberalism, Liberty, and Openness

Chapter 5: Neoliberal Higher Education

Chapter 6: Open Access Policy in the UK

Chapter 7: The Commons as an Alternative Policy Framework

Timeline of versions:

January 2016 (month 4) – Overview, Chapter 3 draft version 0.1 (originally Chapter 1), Chapter 4 draft version 0.1, (originally Chapter 2), Chapter 6 draft version 0.1 (originally Chapter 3)

March 2016 (month 6) – Chapter 4 draft version 0.2 (originally Chapter 2)

May 2016 (month 8) – Chapter 4 draft version 0.3 (originally Chapter 2)