Like motherhood and apple pie, it’s pretty hard to argue against the principle of open access. Publicly funded research should, by definition, be openly available to the public that paid for it. But as Victoria Gardner recently highlighted in a HEPI blog we know very little about how open access might facilitate evidence-informed policy-making or help wider public engagement with research. This post explores these issue from the standpoint of someone who works across the intersection between research and policy (and vice versa).
The main argument of this piece revolves around the notion of ‘the third space’ which is not some form of intergalactic territory but simply the sphere that exists between knowledge-creation and knowledge-mobilisation.
