Open science, research and impact

UCL’s commitment to open access publishing and open science were both celebrated and advanced this year in milestone events.

Case studies

• UCL Press celebrates 10 years of award-winning open access publishing
• LCCOS partners with Francis Crick Institute and LSE on Open Science and Scholarship Festival 

UCL Press celebrates 10 years of award-winning open access publishing

In June, UCL Press marked a decade of open access publishing and over 19.5 million global downloads.

Launched in June 2015 as part of UCL’s commitment to open research and scholarship, UCL Press provides scholars with the opportunity to publish their monographs, journal articles and textbooks via open access, meaning that they are free to download online anywhere in the world.

UCL Press broke the mould as the UK’s first fully open access university press. Over the last 10 years it has published over 380 scholarly monographs and 11 textbooks, and has built a portfolio of 15 scholarly journals.

The pioneering Open Access (OA) programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology.

With global collaboration in mind, UCL Press publishes not only UCL authors but also independent scholars and authors from other academic institutions around the world.

UCL Press’s global reach extends to 242 countries and territories, with the United States topping the list of countries with the highest number of downloads, followed by the UK, then India.

The most downloaded title in the UCL Press list continues to be How the World Changed Social Media by UCL Professor of Anthropology Daniel Miller and a collective of eight other global anthropologists. The title has been downloaded over 930,000 times in over 227 countries and territories since its publication in 2016.

More recently, UCL Press has also established an open access textbooks programme to provide free, high-quality digital textbooks for students.

Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science) and Chief Executive of UCL Press, said:

“From the start, UCL Press was about breaking down barriers. Traditional academic publishing often locks knowledge behind paywalls, with monographs costing academic institutions and the public money and selling just a few hundred copies.
UCL Press flipped this model of publishing on its head. It was the UK’s first fully open access university press, making OA publishing more accessible to both early career researchers and experienced scholars alike.”

A celebratory 10th Anniversary panel discussion, featuring speakers from the worlds of universities and publishing, took place in June 2025.

LCCOS partners with Francis Crick Institute and LSE on Open Science and Scholarship Festival

UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship (OOSS) this year partnered with two neighbouring institutions – the Francis Crick Institute and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – to deliver a week-long Open Science and Scholarship Festival.

An annual event to promote and celebrate Open Science has been organised by LCCOS since 2018 and it remains a highlight of the Office for Open Science and Scholarship’s yearly programme of activities.

This year the Festival, held in early June, presented a rich programme of nine sessions over five days; a mix of in-person, hybrid and online events that touched on the many diverse aspects of open research, including data, open access publishing, reproducibility, the impact of AI and more.

Over the week of activities, 67 people joined events in person and 564 joined online. The reach and reputation of the OOSS were evident in the fact that 23% of participants across the week of events were from outside the UK.

The most attended event was Friday’s session on AI and Authorship – a panel event that explored how we consider “authorship” in light of the increasing use of authorship tools.

UCL’s Open Science Committee have tasked colleagues in the OOSS to build on this success and develop this event into a London festival of open science.

Full details of the 2025 Festival and links to session recordings or summaries are available via the Open@UCL blog.