“Peter, a question. Your book is free online because you want it that way? Is that generosity? You got hacked?”

The questions were from a friend in the fact-checking community that I have been a part of for a decade and a half. He also works at a university and knows just how long it takes to research and write any book, and even more so an academic work that requires time-consuming research and goes through peer review. It puzzled him that I would spend four years working on a book – proposing a new framework for researchers, fact-checkers to identify the potential consequences of misinformation – and then “give it away for free” via open online access.

The assumption of many people on learning that books such as mine are published open access is that the decision to do this is either an act of altruism or the act of a fool. Certainly, open access publishing is not the right approach for every author and every book. Whether it is the right approach depends, I think, on the subject, the audience you seek to reach, and your reasons for reaching them.

In my case, deciding in 2021 to research the effects of the sorts of misinformation I had witnessed as the founder in 2012 of Africa Check, the first fact-checking organisation in Africa, there was, partly, a question of principle behind the decision.

The book I would eventually publish four years later was a close study of 250 fact-checks produced by half a dozen fact-checking organisations operating across sub-Saharan Africa in 2019. Those organisations get support from individuals and donor organisations to fund their work and they make their fact-checks freely available to the public. For three years, from 2016-2019 I had benefitted from a fellowship from a donor organisation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, providing funding to support open access initiatives in education, health and other fields. For three years, it helped me build up Africa Check into a source of reliable information for audiences in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Senegal and provide support to an emerging network of more than 50 fact-checking organisations operating today from Libya to Zimbabwe. If I could find a way to cover my costs, I felt I should make it freely available to the public too.

At the same time, academics like me still need to pay the bills. So how could this work? The answer lies in the thinking about the audience that open access publishing enables an author like me to reach, and, if the book is sufficiently original and provides socially useful, practical ideas, how to secure funding not from the book but from developing the ideas is sets out.

Since it was published in June 2025, my book, ‘Fake News – What’s the harm?’ and a previous work, published in 2021, also by University of Westminster Press, have been downloaded more than 10,000 times by researchers, journalism students and policymakers in more than 100 countries from Australia and the United States to Vietnam and Hong Kong. It has been used in universities to teach student journalists and to train fact-checkers across the Middle East. The book has been downloaded for training researchers looking into disinformation threats in the Baltics and the effects of misinformation on public health in Norway.

Given the financial struggles of most academic and non-profit organisations that work in the misinformation field, in both the US/Europe and the wider world, I believe there is no way that even a tenth of that audience would have downloaded and read the book if they had had to pay for it. For me, this sort of audience reach satisfied my principle that useful ideas should be as widely available and as widely tried and tested as possible. And for me, as the author of the theory set out in the book, there is also a practical self-interest.

By developing the ideas set out in the book, and promoting them to a wide audience, I have been able since 2025 to secure funding for a series of research and training projects that I would not otherwise have had an opportunity to apply for. The evidence underpinning the ideas I propose in my funding pitches is set out in great detail in the work and the fact that it can be easily read online has helped me secure funding for my ongoing work.