 Hi, my name is Lindy Wedovi. I'm a film scholar, a film curator and a filmmaker and my work is primarily focused on the region of Africa with a specific focus on South Africa where I grew up and also on West Africa and some parts of East Africa and particularly Kenya. My research is really very concerned with the link between theory and practice. So while I have been interested in writing about African filmmaking practices it's been very important to me as well to be involved in setting up and directing and curating African film festivals so that African films can be more widely seen within Africa and around the world. And within my publications I have written about film adaptation of literature in West Africa and South Africa in my first book and in my most recent book I have engaged in research but also reflected on my own practices with film festivals to write about the vital relationship between film festivals and African filmmaking. Open access is really important to me for a number of reasons and in particular I think because in my research I write a lot about cultural geographies of access to media and to African film and so if we're writing about that in our research then it seems important that that research itself is also accessible to people particularly in the regions that we are writing about. And because I work on Africa a lot of my research partners are African, my intended audience is often African, my desired interlocutors are often African and so it seems very ironic if the research that I publish then is accessible only within elite university libraries and only within the global north and not within Africa itself. And to me the big problem here is that that really replicates the kind of colonial structure within academic research and maintains a kind of system in which Africans are used as research informants but then they don't actually have, they're not able to participate in the research that they themselves contributed to in very significant ways and so I think we urgently need to change that situation and to actually decolonize our research practices and our publishing practices in that way and especially I think where it comes to the area of Africa and African studies. Another reason that open access is really important to me is that as someone who works between theory and practice it's very important for me that my research is accessible and available not only to academics but also to people working beyond the academic arena and so when I write my imagined audience is not only film scholars but also filmmakers film distributors and exhibitors, film curators, people working in museums and galleries and people interested in the arts in general and so I really want my work to be available to those communities so that we can engage in broader discussions and help to change the world in the areas that we're interested in. And just to give you an example, African filmmakers have contacted me asking me for advice on how to position their films within the international film festival circuit and these are questions that I've thought a lot about and actually written about in my last book but unfortunately that book is not widely accessible because of its high cost, it costs 60 pounds both in its hard copy material form and in its e-book form and that's an amount of money that most individuals can't afford. It's even something that I can't afford to buy, I have many copies of my book because of that and so that halts the process of my research moving beyond the academic arena to really go out into the film industry and to be taken up by people who could actually make a difference in terms of the things that I'm talking about in my book and in my research. Another thing that is very important to me and why open access really matters to me is that my research focuses on contemporary cultures in the humanities which are incredibly dynamic and fast changing and I think open access provides a wonderful opportunity to speed up the process from the submission of our research to the actual publication of our research and it's being made accessible in the public domain and here we really have to ask the question what is the value of knowledge that takes so long to publish that by the time it comes out into the public domain the world has moved on and that research may no longer be relevant or urgent or current and so I think it's very very important that we get that research out quickly so that it can really help to make a difference in the world. I think what's wonderful about open access is that it forces us as academics to really confront vital questions about what our role is in the world and what we see our work is doing and I don't think that it is too naive or too idealistic to say that as academics we want to participate in trying to change the world and in order to do that our research has to be accessible both within academic spaces but also to the broader world and to communities of beneficiaries that could really take that research and go and put it into practice and use it so I think open access really makes us think about our role as academics as also being one of being activists. I've had some really positive experiences publishing open access and in particular with two open access journals the one was Feminist Africa and the other one was Jump Cut a Journal of Contemporary Media and I don't think it's any accident that the articles that I published in those two journals have probably been my most widely read and cited articles. I think it's because that those journals are open access that people could easily locate and access my work. They would have found it through Google searches around the topics that I was writing about and also because those journals are open access I was allowed to put that work on academia.edu and on research gate and also on my personal website which means that more people had access to it.