OA Week 2025: Who owns our knowledge? Event 2

Professor Caroline Edwards is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London and Executive Director of the Open Library of Humanities. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe. Caroline is also widely known as an open access advocate, having co-founded the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) with Professor Martin Eve in 2013. She is currently leading a team of 12 staff at the OLH expanding the publisher’s portfolio of leading humanities journals and overseeing the growth of the OLH’s open-source publishing platform, Janeway. In 2025, Caroline founded the Open Journals Collective (OJC), an international collective of academics, librarians, and university-based publishers. The OJC will launch in 2026, with diamond OA journal portfolios in the arts, humanities and social sciences as well as science, technology, engineering, and maths.

Dr. Kiri West is an Indigenous researcher, kaupapa Māori theoriser, Communication lecturer and a reluctant storyteller. Her primary field of research is Māori Data Sovereignty, with a focus on how tikanga Māori can guide the governance, use, and futures of data. This encompasses the responsibilities of institutions such as universities and government agencies, as well as the aspirations of iwi, hapū, and Māori communities for data that upholds mana and mauri. She concentrates on questions of institutional accountability, Indigenous models of governance, and the ways Māori values can be embedded into digital and technological systems. Currently, her work explores both national and international approaches to Indigenous Data Governance, situating Māori experiences within a broader global context. Her research seeks to transform how data is understood and managed in Aotearoa and beyond, ensuring Māori voices and tikanga shape the paradigms and practices of data governance.

Dr. Alice McSherry is an Indigenous geographer (Naxi Chinese, Pākehā New Zealander) working at the nexus of cultural and ecological revitalisation. She also serves as the kaiwhakatere/navigator of the Waiheke Marine Project (WMP), a place-based collaboration between local community and mana whenua to protect and regenerate the marine environment of Waiheke Island, Aotearoa NZ. The WMP runs several concurrent projects, two of which – the annual Kōura Dive Survey and Kelp Gardeners – actively seek to weave scientific knowledge, mātauranga Māori and local insights into biodiversity restoration. As part of these projects, there is a common aspiration to create open-source data sets that are collectively generated and owned in place to support the revitalisation of mauri in Tīkapa Moana/the Hauraki Gulf. 

Jessica Howie is the Assistant Director, Open Research and Teaching and Learning at Te Iho o te Manawataki | Library at Te Whare Wananga o Waikato | The University of Waikato. She has worked in and around Open Research for nearly 10 years, during which time she helped to establish the Aotearoa Scholarly Communications Community of Practice and worked on several cross-university groups aimed at gathering data on the state of Open Access at the national level. She is passionate about the potential of Open Research to enhance impact and has a particular interest in the intersection of Kaupapa Māori Research and Open Research. In 2023 she was proud to be a part of the team behind Aotearoa’s first university Open Research Position Statement and is excited to be involved in the future of Open Research across the region.