small changes: taking back control of our universities through open software

Universities in the UK are hindered by exploitative corporate software ecosystems. For all the advancement of open research and open access, the use and distribution of open source software in universities and libraries has been neglected in favour of the proprietary software defaults provided top-down by our institutions. Despite progress on open access publishing and open data sharing, university workers still use closed software like Microsoft Word for writing, Microsoft SharePoint for document management, and Microsoft Teams or Zoom for communication and conferencing. I want to discuss the failures of proprietary software in UK Higher Education and advocate for us to take back control of our work using open source software. Proprietary software companies are openly exploiting universities and we are doing nothing to challenge them. A 2019 report from the UK's Department of Education (2019) sets out the Government's vision for the use of technology in education (specifically in England but with a clear agenda for the rest of the UK) and clearly communicates to vendors that UK education is a market ripe for exploitation. In this talk, I will discuss some some individual changes that we can make to our software practices – using Zotero for reference management, using kMeet for videoconferencing, and using Zettlr for note-taking and academic writing – before expanding out to larger software changes – divesting from companies like Microsoft and moving away from proprietary software platforms like Elsevier's Pure or the Ex Libris suite of academic library systems. By embedding open source software in our working practices, we can divest from expensive and unreliable corporate software and take back control of our university IT.