TY - JOUR TI - Making museum research more visible: Open Access in the GLAM sector AU -Emily Rees Koerner AU -Lydia Ackrell PY - 2025 VL - IS - Spring 2025 KW - digital humanities KW - digital technology KW - digitisation KW - museology KW - Online repository KW - open access KW - repository KW - scholarly publishing AB - Open Access paradigms have changed how academic scholarship is published and disseminated, creating a new model for how research is shared. But how do these paradigms map onto museum research? This question is particularly pertinent when larger numbers of funded research projects include, or are led by, museums. This article considers some of the affordances and challenges of using Open Access principles and technologies to make visible the multifaceted modes of research that take place in a museum setting. Using the Science Museum Group as a case study, it focuses on how repositories offer one means to make research conducted in museums more accessible, while also broadening definitions of what a research output is. With the focus hitherto more on images and collection items, here we expand into the realm of exhibition and gallery outputs – the content which museums produce to narrate their collections’ stories and engage audiences. Many of these outputs may have been designed to have an ephemeral, physical lifespan, but through platforms such as repositories they can gain a digital afterlife, serving a new purpose as learning resources, research data, or indeed a record of curatorial and museological practice. The article ultimately argues that Open Access principles can aid museums (and the wider GLAM sector) in their mission to be transparent organisations for wide-ranging audiences. N1 - See Government to open up publicly funded research (last accessed 14 March 2025). N1 - For example, United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), see UK Research and Innovation Open Access Policy (last accessed 20 November 2024). N1 - For more information, see Our mission (last accessed 14 March 2025). N1 - See The Met’s website for more information: Open access (last accessed 8 November 2024). N1 - See The Congruence Engine (last accessed 20 November 2024) and the special issue on the project in Issue 18 of this journal. N1 - The report is available here: Making the Business Case for Open Access (last accessed 8 November 2024). N1 - The strategy is available here: (last accessed 8 November 2024). N1 - SMG’s research repository is available to view via this link: Shared Research Repository (last accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - As Jia Liu highlights, DOIs are an increasingly prominent identifier used when finding and accessing scholarly information in a digital format (Liu, 2021, p 1). With the popularity of digital publishing, the problem of broken links to digital content is ever increasing. DOI was designed to address this problem by assigning a unique identifier to an object, separate from its location. The registry system of DOIs contains structured metadata and a link to the content. If the location of the content changes, the link can be easily updated to point to that new location. Although DOIs originated in text publishing, this system has become the generic framework for managing content over digital networks (see, Liu, J, 2021, ‘Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship’, Journal of eScience Librarianship, 10 (2); Uzwyshyn, 2016). N1 - The link to the article can be found here: Museums urged to tackle succession planning (last accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - An example of this type of upload can be viewed here: Ancient Greeks: Story Matrix (accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - This collection can be accessed via this link: Sound and Music Collection (accessed 16 November 2024). N1 - This collection can be accessed via this link: Oramics to Electronica Collection (accessed 16 November 2024). N1 - This collection can be accessed via this link: Sound and Place: Digital Mapping and Community Listening Practice Collection (accessed 16 November 2024). N1 - The online article can be accessed here: Museum of London acquires viral tweets to document lockdown (accessed 16 November 2024). N1 - This collection on the repository can be accessed via this link: Unlocking Lovelock: Scientist, Inventor, Maverick (accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - This collection on the repository can be accessed via this link: Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain (accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - This collection on the repository can be accessed via this link: Hayabusa2: The mission that brought an asteroid sample to Earth (accessed 13 November 2024). N1 - The strategy is available here: Open for All Strategy 2022-2025 (last accessed 18 November 2024). N1 - Collection Online is available here: Collection Online PB - The Science Museum Group SN - 2054-5770 LA - eng DO - 10.15180/252304 UR - https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/making-museum-research-more-visible-open-access-in-the-glam-sector/ T2 - Science Museum Group Journal