Have the aims of Open Access been 'co-opted' by other agendas?

Are top-down policies necessary for OA?

Is it better to convince the indifferent from the ground-up, telling them about OA benefits and creating incentives?

These are some of the questions we'll be asking in a discussion to mark International Open Access Week 2016. The Office of Scholarly Communication and Cambridge University Press invite you to join us and a panel of researchers and publishers to explore how far Open Access is truly egalitarian and enabling.

Our panel will include:

• Mark Patterson - Executive Director, eLife and former Director of Publishing at PLoS
• Kirstie Whitaker - Cambridge neuroscience researcher, Mozilla Fellows for Science, advocate of open science and organiser of OpenCon Cam 2015 and 2016
• Matt Hodgkinson - Head of Research Integrity at Hindawi, formerly editor at PLoS ONE and BioMed Central
• Stuart Lawson - researcher at Birkbeck, University of London undertaking a PhD in the politics of open access. An information professional and editor of the Journal of Radical Librarianship, Stuart previously worked as a Research Analyst at Jisc and is involved in work around financial transparency in scholarly communication.

We invite you to submit your questions to the panel in advance - please share your thoughts with us via Twitter: @CamOpenAccess #OAWeekCam

Our panel will address the ideology, activism, politics and practice of the Open Access movement, and will be moderated by Dr Danny Kingsley, Head of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge.

In addition to the live audience, we will stream the session through the Cambridge University Library YouTube channel and invite engagement via Twitter throughout the discussion - join us here.