Reflecting on publishing and research culture during Open Access week 2025 – with Laura Carter and Freddy Foks
At the University of London Press, we have been reflecting on recent conversations in the sector about research culture, what this means for the humanities, the potential benefits of open access, the role of publishing and our own role as a publisher.
In this series of blog posts, recent UoL Press authors share their own publishing experiences and words of advice and support for new authors, along with their views on open access and what more publishers can do to work with the research community to help build supportive, collaborative and open research and publishing cultures.
In our next post in the series, we talk to Laura Carter and Freddy Foks, two of the editors of Democratising History: Modern British History Inside and Out. Laura Carter is an historian of modern Britain whose work focuses on histories of education, gender, and social change. Her first book, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (2021) was nominated for the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Book Prize, 2022. She is now working on a project about secondary education and social change in the United Kingdom since 1945. Freddy Foks is an historian of modern Britain and the British Empire with research interests in migration history and the history of the social sciences. His book Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (2023) was awarded the Constance Blackwell Prize by the International Society for Intellectual History. He is currently working on a book about emigration and thinking about a new project about ships.
- Tell us about your book with UoL Press.
LC: Democratising History tells the story of Britain’s ‘democratic’ transition since the early nineteenth century. We think about this transition in the widest terms, covering not just the extension of the franchise but the democratisation of culture more broadly, with a particular focus on the role played by education. The book contains a synthesizing introduction and a series of research chapters written by historians of empire, migration, political thought, social, cultural, and art history. In addition, the book contains a number of ‘interludes’ which look at the place of history in British higher education over the last several decades, a subject we also think has democratised. This latter part is what we call the ‘outside’ view, and the research chapters form the ‘inside’ view, giving the book its subtitle Modern British History Inside and Out.
FF: The book’s origins also lay in our desire to publish something in time to celebrate the retirement of Professor Peter Mandler in 2025. We wanted to publish important historical research that would reflect, too, on Peter’s own career. While this is not a ‘traditional’ festschrift, Democratising History is edited by three of Peter’s former PhD supervisees and it contains the work of a number of his former students, his colleagues and his friends. We wanted to offer readers a book that would help them reflect on democratisation in modern British history while also speaking to Peter’s many and varied influences on the field of modern British history. - What advice do you have for authors looking to publish their first book?
LC: Think about books you admire, have enjoyed, and have learnt most about your field from, and go from there. That might lead you to thinking about style, format, and framing, as well as which series or publishers to approach.
FF: I’d also recommend being clear about who you hope your audience is. A PhD may be written for yourself, your supervisor and your examiners and no one else – an audience of 3 or 4 or 5 people. Making the jump up to ‘the book’ can feel daunting, especially when you think of all the other amazing books out there. I got a bit paralyzed by that jump. So I found it helpful to take a step back and to imagine myself writing for a hypothetical graduate student looking for a grounding in the topic. What kind of book would this MA student find helpful and informative? I’m sure that I still presumed too much prior knowledge throughout my book, but writing for an audience of curious readers (and being realistic about who these readers will almost certainly be) helped shift my writing away from being overly defensive towards being more inclusive and explanatory. - Why did you choose the University of London Press as your publisher?
LC: As per the above, I’d admired other books published by UoLP as well as their bold Open Access policy. Since I work and teach in France and my University does not have access to a lot of the subscriptions that UK research libraries might have, I’m always prioritizing accessible research material for my students, meaning UoLP was even more on my radar.
FF: It was important to us that whoever published the book would support us in pushing for open access. We also wanted a press that had published edited collections in modern British history. So UoLP seemed like the perfect place to pitch our proposal. - Do you think open access has a role to play in creating a positive research culture and, if so, how?
LC: I think OA can encourage us to avoid gatekeeping our research, not just from the general public, but between colleagues. When OA is done well and policies are crafted with the norms of the discipline in mind (in our case history), it helps facilitate conversations and connections between scholars faster and across borders (cultural, national, linguistic) than traditional academic publishing.
FF: Laura has put it perfectly. - The theme of International Open Access week in 2025 is ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ Why do you think this is an important question for humanities researchers and how does that influence your publishing choices?
LC: I don’t think any kind of knowledge can really be owned by one individual, we’re all working on shared and circulated knowledge and trying to add something meaningful to debates in our fields. So I think we all just have to work hard at delineating when we are claiming original ideas or interventions, and when we are building on other peoples’ and community knowledge in our everyday practice. That’s what we can do as individual researchers; regarding the broader landscape of how AI uses our research and circulates knowledge, I think that is something that needs to be urgently regulated by states.
FF: While I agree that states need to regulate AI companies effectively, authors and publishers and lawyers have a role to play, too. We can’t just wait for governments to catch up. There are a huge number of cases in UK and US courts, right now, which may end up shaping the way copyright law works in the future. And Open Access Week draws attention to the way that commercial incentives may bake inequalities into positive-sounding claims to make research more ‘open’. Publishing open access costs money. We were lucky to secure funding that allowed us to publish our volume OA, but that kind of support isn’t available to everyone. One of the main themes of our book is that democratisation, whether of politics or knowledge or education, doesn’t just happen automatically. More equal access to goods and services and power can be achieved through collective effort and it can be rolled back, too. Without joined-up thinking about how open access publication is funded we are likely to see new forms of international and inter-institutional inequalities emerging as costs to publish OA in leading journals and book series exclude everyone except the rich few or those associated with rich institutions. So there is a great deal of struggle ahead. Libraries – the beating heart of humanities research and also, too often, the unsung heroes of that research – are likely to be at the centre of the good fight.
