Lavender Sounds, the audio archives.

Open Research objectives/practices

• Making the outputs of research freely available
• Increasing the transparency of research processes and methodologies
• Capitalizing on unique open aspects of open educational resources

Introduction

'Lavender Sounds, the audio archives' is a three-part audio documentary I produced on the history of 1970s–80s lesbian feminist radio and how it lives on in queer podcasting today. The open access work is features archival recordings and interviews I gathered during my research for the companion book project, including material from Vancouver Co-op Radio'sThe Lesbian Show and ArQuives, the LGBTQ+ archives of Canada. I made it as a book companion, but also conceived it as a distinct scholarly output: a place where the archive itself and the methods of research can be heard.

I released the documentary through two complementary open channels. It is distributed as a publicly accessible podcast via RSS feed, discoverable and searchable across every major podcast platform rather than locked to one proprietary space. Each of its three episodes is also separately archived on the University of Michigan Press's Fulcrum platform, where it receives its own persistent DOI and a stable, citable scholarly home, dependent of the RSS feed.

This structure makes my research process transparent in a way that the manuscript alone cannot. Rather than presenting only finished conclusions, the documentary lets listeners hear the archival material directly, including its gaps, silences, and fragments, so the "scavenger methodology" behind the project, piecing together partial tapes, newspaper clippings, and interviews with former radio hosts, is audible. The Fulcrum page for each episode documents full credits for every archival source, music sample, and contributor, making the evidentiary and permissions trail behind the work public and checkable. Full transcripts are also included for accessibility.

The documentary also tests an alternative model of scholarly publication. Instead of treating audio as illustrative supplementary material to a written argument, I published each episode as its own DOI-bearing object, on par with a journal article. This way it stands as a citable, peer-referenceable output. Because it is openly licensed and freely reusable, the series also functions as an open educational resource: instructors can assign individual episodes directly, without institutional access, as primary listening material for teaching queer media history or research-informed audio production practices.

Motivation

I used these open practices because the people this documentary is about, and for, are largely outside the university. It belongs to the radio hosts and organizers whose recordings and voices make this work possible. Releasing it behind a paywall would have meant that the very people whose history it tells, and the wider queer and feminist communities who might recognize themselves in it, would be least able to hear it. Open access was not an add-on to the documentary; it was the only distribution consistent with the project's politics.

The dual-channel release serves distinct audiences. RSS distribution reaches general and community listeners with no institutional login and no special software, the way any other podcast reaches them. Fulcrum's DOIs serve scholars, students, and future researchers who need a stable, citable reference, so this soundwork can be footnoted just like any other academic source, and so it survives even if the hosting platform someday disappears. Making the research process itself audible benefits anyone assessing or building on the work, letting others hear exactly how conclusions were assembled from the stories and archives gathered.

The benefits extend beyond this one documentary too. It can be used as a model workflow for other scholars working with sound, interviews, or community archives: distributing widely through free tools like RSS, publishing audio with an academic journal or university press, and making the finished work usable as teaching material.

URLs, references and further information

• Copeland, Stacey. 2026. Welcome to Lavender Sounds, the audio archives (Trailer, Fulcrum Open Access), University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14485683.cmp.6
• RSS.comPodcast Feed: https://rss.com/podcasts/lavender-sounds-the-audio-archives/