Simon is a Senior Lecturer and Course Director in the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University.

He received his PhD from the University of Sheffield’s Information School in 2015, having previously completed an MSc in Electronic and Digital Library Management. He also holds a BA in English Literature from Durham University (1999) and an MA in American Literature from the University of Sheffield (2006).

Before joining CSU in 2019 Simon was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield’s Information School, and prior to that he held various project and operations management roles in the telecoms and vocational training industries.

Simon was awarded the CSU Executive Dean’s Award for Teaching in 2022 for “Maximising student engagement and learning in a postgraduate Information Studies research methods subject through structured video content creation and enhanced teacher presence.”

His teaching is primarily in the areas of research methods (INF567, ETL567, INF321) and data management (INF461, INF463 and INF449).

He is Course Director for the Graduate Certificate in Data Management, Graduate Certificate of Audiovisual Archiving, and Graduate Certificate of Information Studies. He is also the Specialisation Coordinator for the Master of Information Studies (Data Management).

Simon’s research focuses on equality of access to information. There are two main strands to his work. The first focuses on the area of scholarly communication, and open access (OA) – the principle that research outputs should be freely available to anyone who wants to read them. His work in on this has included the publication of a book on the theory and practice of OA. The second strand of research relates to the role and function of public libraries, including responses to the COVID-19 crisis, the value of public library buildings, and the ways in which community needs can be understood and incorporated into public library design processes.