Copim's concerns around the Online Safety Act 2023 | Copim

by Simon Bowie and Kevin Sanders

On 25 July 2025, Ofcom, the regulator for communication services in the UK, began requiring online platforms to enforce age verification checks as a consequence of the UK's Online Safety Act 2023. This prompted a new round a discussion about the controversies of the recent law since it began to impact a wide range of online content providers. Copim is very concerned about the impact of the Online Safety Act on open access publishing – particularly for small scholar-led presses and any presses publishing LGBTQ+ or queer scholarly work – and the authoritarian potentials of restricting the open availability of any online content that the UK Government deems to be "harmful". The Online Safety Act, in many ways, impedes the expansion of making scholarly research openly available.

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