In the last few years, there has been a marked shift in the debate on open access publishing from a focus on (mere) outputs to one on infrastructures. With terms such as ‘community-led’, ‘the commons’ and ‘governance’ regularly bandied about, advocates for OA are increasingly looking away from commercial publishers and towards infrastructures designed by …
Continue reading “Standardisation and difference: the challenges of infrastructures for open access”
I’ve just made my Ph.D thesis available on Humanities Commons: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/st5m-cx33 Title: Common Struggles: Policy-based vs. scholar-led approaches to open access in the humanities
I’ve just uploaded a preprint of the article titled ‘Revisiting ‘the 1990s debutante’: scholar-led publishing and the pre-history of the open access movement’ to the Humanities Commons repository. The article is also being submitted to a journal and will no doubt change a great deal before publication. I’ve never shared an unreviewed preprint as a …
There’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Bill Readings. His monograph The University in Ruins is an essential text for anyone interested in critical university studies and the history of the marketised university. In the book, published in 1994, Readings argues that the university is no longer a space for the understanding of culture …
Open access has always been promoted for its reputational benefits. The OA citation advantage is one way in which advocates try to convince researchers of the benefits of publicly sharing their work. So too is the increased speed of publication and broader reach of open access research. At the university level, institutional repositories are often …
Continue reading “No amount of open access will fix the broken job market”
The Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) is a not-for-profit learned society composed of 35,000 members from across the globe. It describes itself as ‘a charitable organization supporting research and education in molecular life sciences through its journals, fellowships, courses, congress and other activities’. Indeed, in 2017 FEBS awarded €1,375,486 in bursaries, travel grants and …
I was recently given Amazon credit as payment for peer-reviewing a monograph. While this was a nice perk for doing something I probably would have done for free, it is striking to see just how much Amazon impacts on the publishing industry in often unexpected ways. The influence of Amazon on open access — from …
Continue reading “Resisting Amazon’s influence on open access publishing”
Following on from my last post on academic freedom and statements of principle, I want to further clarify my thoughts on how academic freedom relates to open access mandates. Paradoxically, despite claiming that objections to open access mandates on the grounds of academic freedom are mere conservatism, it is likely that the coercive aspect of …
This is a restatement of something that I (and others no doubt) have said before, but I thought it worth putting down in writing here. I recently saw a few people on Twitter sharing a link to the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project highlighting its relevance to Plan S. The project collates and archives examples of …
Continue reading “Plan S: academic freedom and statements of principle”
Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking back-and forth, and especially, to standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object. Susan Leigh Star, ‘This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’, p. 614. In my previous post on …
