I’ve just published the article ‘Open Access, Plan S and ‘Radically Liberatory’ Forms of Academic Freedom’ in the journal Development and Change. Abstract below. Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12640 Abstract This opinion piece interrogates the position that open access policies infringe academic freedom. Through an analysis of the objections to open access policies (specifically Plan S) that draw …
Category archives: Open access
Look to the commons for the future of R&D and science policy
Originally posted on the LSE Impact Blog The production and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is unquestionably good news and hopefully heralds the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. Much of this progress is down to the spirit of collaboration shown by scientists around the world in the race to beat the virus. …
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OASPA panel on funding and business mechanisms for equitable open access
On 22nd September I’ll be participating in a panel on funding and business mechanisms for equitable open access for the 2020 OASPA conference. I’ll be using the opportunity to discuss some of the projects I’m involved in – notably the Radical Open Access Collective and the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project – …
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The datafication in transformative agreements for open access publishing
Transformative agreements are an increasingly common way for universities and consortia to shift publisher business models towards open access. They do this through a prearranged payment that allows institutions to access subscription content while allowing future research to published in an openly accessible form. These deals are a way for publishers to continue to receive …
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How can we understand the different effects of UKRI’s open access policy on small learned societies in the humanities?
The UKRI open access consultation deadline is this Friday and we’re likely to see a flurry of responses leading up to it. One response to the consultation caught my eye today from the Friends of Coleridge, a society that ‘exists to foster interest in the life and works of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and …
COVID-19 and the future of open access
On February 26th, what feels like a lifetime ago now, the Los Angeles Times published a column with the headline ‘COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model. That would be a good thing’. Its author, Michael Hiltzik, argues that for-profit publishing is ‘under assault by universities and government agencies frustrated at being forced to …
Notes on open access and COVID-19
As this feels like the first day in a while that I have enough concentration to write, I thought I’d take the opportunity to jot down some thoughts guided by the question: what on earth can the pandemic teach us about open access to knowledge?
The undecidable nature of predatory publishing
The term ‘predatory publisher’ reveals a limit of language – or rather it asks too much of language. It seeks a binary separation between ‘predatory’ and ‘non-predatory’ where no such separation can exist, ultimately illustrating more about the motivations and hidden biases about the accuser than the supposedly predatory journal at hand. We therefore need …
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How the academic publishing oligopoly skews debates on the cost of publishing
When the original BOAI declaration on open access was published, one of its stated aims was to ‘save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time’ through open access publishing. The web offered distribution costs that the authors claimed were ‘far lower’ than print publishing and so OA was seen at least …
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Who are these ‘open access advocates’?
If you’re at all interested in open access publishing, you probably know that it has a long and complicated history. There are disagreements and differences over strategies, tactics, politics, definitions, motivations, disciplinary approaches, business models and routes to OA. Many words have been spilled over the ‘mess’ that open access has become and the fact …