Speaking: I speak regularly about information access and the open knowledge movement, the history of libraries and scholarly publishing, and how technology and policy shape the future of research communication. I’m always glad to speak on related topics as my schedule allows, and I particularly welcome invitations from librarians and open access–focused audiences for in-person events in the UK.
(I also speak publicly on behalf of Cambridge University Press at industry events such as the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs; those talks aren’t included here.)
Below are a few recent example keynotes:
Inaugural Lecture for new LLM in Technology Law and Regulation at the University of Glasgow, October 2025
This public lecture looked at copyright as infrastructure in the age of AI: the shared systems that make large-scale knowledge sharing possible and reflect collective choices about access and responsibility. I focused on two pressure points in today’s scholarly ecosystem: coordination problems across borders and systems, and the growing maintenance gaps exposed by generative AI: messy rights metadata, unclear licensing for machine use, and weak signals of quality and integrity. I closed by sketching some practical ways forward. Slides can be viewed below:
Keynote for International Copyright-Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars (Icepops), September 2025
In this talk, I explored how generative and agentic AI are reshaping scholarly discovery. As research moves from citation-based systems to AI-generated summaries and syntheses, long-standing assumptions about copyright, authorship, and impact start to shift. I challenged what this means for libraries and publishers as stewards of quality, provenance, and access, and sketched a few practical guardrails, from licensing and attribution to metrics, that could help keep scholarly communication trustworthy and well-incentivised. I closed by reflecting on the particular role of Open Access in this changing landscape, and what’s at stake for the wider open knowledge movement. Slides can be viewed below:
Image description: A Computer Output Microfiche card
Keynote for Academic Libraries North Conference, July 2025
I delivered the in-person keynote at the Academic Libraries North 2025 conference in July, with a talk titled “The 10,000 year librarian: Radical sustainability for enduring knowledge.” I focused on a few different models of obsolescence, a framework of radical sustainability for information access, and ways of avoiding the wrong kind of longtermism in library planning. Whenever I speak publicly I try to work in some history of library technology, and this time Eugene Power and University Microfilms International was woven through the talk as a cautionary tale. Pictured is an example of a computer output microfiche (COM) card, which was used to distribute information to universities that couldn’t afford their own computer terminals but did have microfiche readers. Slides can be viewed below: