Opening the Future, Author Profile: Dean Allbritton

Dean Allbritton’s book Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain was published by Liverpool University Press in 2023. The book was published open access, thanks to funding provided by Copim’s collective library funding model, “Opening the Future”. Using Opening the Future, Liverpool University Press is able to raise money for new open access titles in an equitable and reliable way, and without charging authors or their institutions fees. Thanks to libraries supporting Opening the Future, readers around the world can now access Allbritton’s OA ebook for free via platforms like JSTOR.

We asked Assoc. Prof Allbritton to tell us a bit more about Feeling Sick and the important topics this research explores:

Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain is a cultural history of the first phase of the AIDS crisis in Spain, from 1981 to 1987. It looks at how the virus and the people affected by it were represented across a wide range of cultural materials—television news, medical journals, activist pamphlets, bar flyers, and more. These early years were marked by confusion, stigma, and profound change, and my book traces how Spanish society grappled with those shifts during a critical moment in its transition to democracy.

Drawing on the concept of a “structure of feeling” from Raymond Williams, I argue that these years were defined by a shared sense of unease—a feeling of being sick, socially and culturally, as well as physically. The book brings together media analysis, historical research, and visual culture to tell a story about vulnerability, fear, connection, and the ways we make sense of illness as it unfolds.

Thanks to open access, this story can now reach readers around the world—activists, researchers, students, and general readers alike—without barriers. I hope it speaks to those who lived through these histories and those just beginning to learn about them.

At Copim, we’re proud that funding provided by Opening the Future enabled Feeling Sick to be published without the barrier of a Book Processing Charge. Allbritton’s research is having a profound impact on readers, and garnering praise from academic reviewers. For example, Alberto Mira (Oxford Brookes University), writes:

Dean Allbritton’s layered, carefully researched, deeply empathetic book constitutes a profound assessment of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in Spain […] The result is an exploration of pain: what it does to us, what we turn it into, and how that pushes against the limit of its chronological framework to address us now.1

Álvaro González Montero (University of Leeds) has also praised Allbritton’s sensitive and thorough research:

Feeling Sick constitutes an exemplary piece of historical and cultural research, combining theoretical insights with a very solid body of queer evidence [to produce] a compelling and original narrative of how HIV and AIDS were construed during Spain’s transition to democracy.2

Echoing these sentiments, Miguel Caballero (Northwestern University), has noted that Allbritton:

introduces previously unknown or little-known materials into circulation, which the author contextualizes and analyzes with meticulous care and sophistication. It also provides interpretations of the indifference and indolence that characterized the initial institutional and societal response to HIV. […] Allbritton's book serves as a fantastic exploration of the early AIDS era in Spain. It is destined to become a reference for scholars studying the AIDS pandemic, the cultural aspects of the political transition from military dictatorship to parliamentary monarchy in Spain, and the 1980s counter-cultures.3

Because Feeling Sick was published open access, readers both in and outside of academia can now read the work for free: granting a wide range of audiences access to Allbritton’s “deeply empathetic” and “compelling” exploration of a crucial topic.

We asked Allbritton to describe the benefits of open access publishing. Has this method been beneficial for him and his readers?

Open access has been extraordinarily beneficial. Feeling Sick is about people and communities who were silenced and marginalized for decades. Being able to make this history freely available—without paywalls or institutional logins—means a great deal to me. I’ve been able to share the book widely, not only with scholars, but also with friends, activists, and community members who might not otherwise have access to expensive academic texts. I feel deeply fortunate that this kind of open access publishing exists, and I’m grateful to be part of it.

Has the process of publishing Feeling Sick open access changed Allbritton’s mind about any aspects of open access publishing?

I’ve long been a supporter of open access, but this experience has reinforced just how important and transformative it can be. I’ve only had one previous opportunity to publish something open access—an article my institution helped fund—but the high costs involved make it hard to repeat. With Feeling Sick, the process felt more equitable and sustainable. I’ve encouraged colleagues to explore these possibilities, especially when working on projects that could resonate with broader publics. Making our work accessible is part of demystifying what scholars do—and that’s both healthy and necessary.

Here, Assoc. Prof Allbritton helpfully highlights the different forms open access publishing can take. Author-facing article and book processing charges can make publishing open access expensive and inequitable. These fees make open access publication a luxury or a one-off experience academics struggle to pursue often. However, collective funding models like Opening the Future are offering a vital alternative, by allowing scholars like Allbritton to publish their work open access and fee-free: with no barriers to authors and no paywalls to readers. At Copim, we’re proud to be supporting equitable open access publishing, and agree that this is “both healthy and necessary”.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash