Research updates

Following on from the success of our May 2025 half-day event on “Open research issues and prospects in the Arts, Humanities and Social Science”, we are organising a second event on 13 November 2025, 1-5pm, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

Developments in digital open research and open access publishing have generated a thriving ecosystem of practices, policies and approaches in university and library settings. The emergence and rapid uptake of AI platforms and technologies create possibilities and tensions within this ecosystem, and challenge those committed to open research to consider its future anew in terms of sustainability, infrastructure and ethics. Join this session to explore how these issues are playing out in practice, and reflect on what the future of publishing might, and could, hold.

We’ll hear from a range of speakers on the following topics: 

Dr Sarah Ames - "Digital research, open data and AI at the National Library of Scotland"

Sarah is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, with responsibility for Digital Research, including the Library’s open data platform, Data Foundry. She has collaborated on a wide range of research initiatives bringing together digital tools and methods to explore the national collections

Dr Lisa Otty - "Open and Sustainable Research Practices in the Age of AI"

Lisa is Head of Data-Led Methods at EFI, where she leads work to build capacity in applied computational research. With an academic background in textual scholarship and publishing, she has worked on a series of projects focused on bibliographic data, text collections and digital archives. 

Dr Ben Williamson - "Open to AI: the transformation of academic content into data assets by publishers and big tech"

Ben is a senior lecturer and co-director at the Centre for Research in Digital Education, and an editor of Learning, Media and Technology.

Sign up at: https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=80681