Open Access Week 2021

October 25th-31st 2021 is International Open Access Week. Open access means making academic knowledge available to all, without paywalls or other barriers.

To celebrate Open Access Week, we’d like to highlight our institutional repository, ARRO, which is managed by the University Library.

ARRO is short for Anglia Ruskin Research Online and is home to over 4500 full text outputs from researchers at Anglia Ruskin University. These range from journal articles and conference papers to book chapters and more. Wherever possible, outputs on ARRO are fully open access so that anyone can access them and benefit from the knowledge.

ARRO is also home to a large collection of doctoral theses produced by our postgraduate research students at ARU. These lengthy documents are a great source of valuable and often very specific knowledge and the vast majority are fully open access.

Did you know that many of our most popular outputs on ARRO are from our thesis collection? Here are four of the most downloaded theses over the past 12 months:

“What is the difference between Ecstasy and MDMA?” by Alexandra Turner (2016)

“In society there is a discrepancy that has developed in what the public understands about what Ecstasy is, in relation to the term ‘MDMA’… …This is the first reported study of the relative purity of the alternate forms of MDMA.”

Read it at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/701011/

“Identity construction in the Furry fandom” by Jessica R. Austin (2018)

“Furries are a fandom that has been developing away from the public eye and yet has appeared in a negative way in many media representations... …The purpose of this project is to show that negative media representations of the Furry Fandom have wrongly pathologized the Furries as deviants as opposed to fans.”

Read it at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/704249/

“Understanding graphic narrative through the synthesis of comic and picturebooks” by Rebecca Palmer (2016)

“This study was undertaken to develop a better understanding of comics, picturebooks, and their relationship through progressive attempts to combine them in practice. The study was motivated by an interest in hybrid forms as a site where narrative techniques from different forms are put to alternative use in a new context.”

Read it at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/701523/  

“"My mother is a goddess", "I am an inmate here": Male prisoners' attitudes towards women and their perceptions of culpability from Delhi Prison” by Madhumita Pandey (2018)

“While research on sexual violence in India has considered victim perspectives and policy reforms, offender perspectives remain highly underrepresented in the literature. The aim of this research was to understand the underlying social mechanisms that support and maintain violence against women, and in its extreme form, rape in Indian society.”

Read it at: http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/704101/

We have hundreds of doctoral theses in our collection, with more being added all the time. You can browse them by year on ARRO, or you can use our Advanced Search page to search by topic or author (ensure you’ve ticked “Thesis” in the Item Type section).

Happy reading!