OA Week 2025: FMRA Activity Update

Open Access Week 2025 starts today, and it provides an opportunity for a long overdue update of what the Forced Migration Research Archive (FMRA) has been up to since it was launched two years ago! After a brief review, I will use examples from FMRA’s holdings to illustrate the various ways authors have provided open access to their research and, in the process, hopefully encourage others to follow suit. (If you are not yet familiar with the FMRA, you can get a brief introduction via this FAQ.) 

Here is a summary of FMRA's efforts since its inception:

1) Special collections: The FMRA website features curated collections from researchers who have engaged with the Refugee Research Network and who have significantly contributed to the field of refugee research. The first was established in memory of Dr. Abdel Aziz Thabet, a child psychiatrist in Gaza who was also an affiliated scholar at the Centre for Refugee Studies until his death in 2020. We sought out and received permission from the Arab Journal of Psychiatry to include a number of Dr. Thabet's journal articles in the FMRA, along with various open access pieces that he co-authored.

2) Global South journals: FMRA is working with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group to support long-term preservation of and access to the content of its flagship journal, Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration. Because authors retain copyright over their contributions, they must provide their express approval to include their articles in FMRA. A separate deposit form was created for this purpose. Articles that have been contributed to date have the advantage of being indexed by Google Scholar, which in turn will hopefully lead to greater discoverability and readership. Here is one example.

3) At-risk content: We learned recently that the Refugee Review, a unique peer-reviewed journal that was a product of the Emerging Scholars and Practitioners on Migration Issues (ESPMI) Network, was not able to retain its presence online due to funding issues. To ensure continued access to the archives over the long-term, we were able to track down copies of the five issues and gain permission from editors to deposit them in FMRA. The collection can be viewed here.

4) Author outreach: FMRA's collection is still relatively small: 117 items as of this writing. For a variety of reasons, it can be challenging for institutional repositories to increase their deposit rates. One strategy that FMRA has adopted is to solicit content directly from authors. To date, these targeted efforts have translated to 48 deposits, or 40% of the collection. A particular "selling point" for authors may be  FMRA's "mediated deposit" service; in other words, a librarian undertakes all of the cataloguing required for an item to be officially uploaded to the system. All that is required for authors to make a submission is the completion of this very short form, with a PDF attached. Please give it a go!