The monograph should be the passport to mobile research success - University World News

"There is no escaping it: mobility has become the buzzword of research today. Academics everywhere are facing increasing incentives to join a new generation of ‘mobile researchers’ – or ‘passport professors’ as they are also known. To become mobile, researchers must move out of traditional ‘spaces’ of scholarship to work across borders, disciplines or sectors. The European Union, in particular, has earmarked mobile researchers as the key to securing its future competitiveness and is currently making considerable efforts to establish a fully functioning ‘open labour market’ for researchers. As a result, there has been a rapid rise in support mechanisms for mobile researchers, intended to help them make the cultural transition to their new, cross-cutting research environments. Yet, as debates roll on in the humanities and the social sciences about the upshots of publishing in different scholarly formats, it is surprising that guidance on academic publishing for mobile researchers is still missing from the equation. To talk about academic publishing and open access is no new thing. But what happens when we redefine what we mean by the term open access and change the rhetoric to put the focus back on the people behind the ideas, rather than on the ideas themselves? We may think of open access as the free global exchange of knowledge for societal benefit, but for it to work effectively researchers, too, must be free to move and work across different research systems ..."