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 fellowships to its members (source). As a charitable organisation, it is understandably keen to avoid any perceived threats to its annual income, hence this article concerning Plan S. The authors write:
Continue reading “Plan S: ending the unholy alliance between learned societies and subscription publishers?”Resisting Amazon’s influence on open access publishing
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 the big commercials and open science startups to not-for-profit university and scholar-led presses — is at least as pernicious as the predatory practices of large commercial publishers.
Continue reading “Resisting Amazon’s influence on open access publishing”Plan S: how open access can nurture new positive and collective forms of ‘academic freedom’
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 mandates is what perpetuates such objections.
Continue reading “Plan S: how open access can nurture new positive and collective forms of ‘academic freedom’”Plan S: academic freedom and statements of principle
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 state violence, imprisonment
Plan S: is there another way?
Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking
Susan Leigh Star, ‘This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’, p. 614.back-and forth , and especially, to standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object.
In my previous post on the Plan S consultation
But understandings of open access — and publishing more generally — are not unified between academics themselves. This is where much-used phrases like ‘one size
In an article published in 2017, I explored the idea of different conceptions of open access with respect to what Star and Griesemer term a ‘boundary object’, something with a nuanced understanding within a particular community that is flexible enough to be understood between communities also. OA is a good example of a boundary object because it has a general meaning of freely accessible research but a specific meaning within communities that reflects its highly subject nature. OA can have a variety of definitions, motivations
This is why policy consultations result in quite an awkward list of disagreements between those with a variety of interests and working practices to protect. These groups really are talking at cross-purposes. There is no way of navigating these differences without excluding some at the expense of others. As reflected in the Star quote above, policymakers ‘
But this doesn’t mean that policy instruments cannot be used to stimulate good initiatives and progressive outcomes. Too often,
References
Star, Susan Leigh. 2010. ‘This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’. Science, Technology & Human Values 35 (5): 601–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910377624.
Plan S: What’s the point of policy consultations?
The window has just closed for contributing feedback to Plan S, the policy initiative from a coalition of European research funders that seeks to mandate open access to funded research. Lisa Hinchliffe provides a helpful summary of the main themes and general trends from the feedback and it is not my intention to explore them here. However, after reading a number of responses from a range of interested parties (many of which
At first glance, consultations are an opportunity for
The problem with such a conception of policy consultations is that it isn’t entirely clear how they should work: Whose comments should be taken into account (and are they weighted somehow)? Who gets to speak for whom? How do the Plan S architects incorporate such divergent and often oppositional feedback? Put simply, it is unclear how such feedback could ever result in a representative and fair process if all responses have to be accounted for somehow. Policy consultations are thus not an exercise in radical democracy.
But, as Hinchliffe notes in the link above, some general themes have emerged from the consultation that (more often than not) express a general commitment to open access, openness and/or access but suggest improvements to the policy (both major and minor). But again, how does the coalition take this into account? Why are the views of some responders more important than others? How do they justify any subsequent changes to the policy as a result of the consultation? These questions are difficult to answer if one assumes that the consultation is anything more than mere lip service or screaming into the void.
In my
From the perspective of cOAlition S, we might think of the policy consultation as an example of what Michael Callon termed
Interessement also entails the need to speak on behalf of those who cannot talk. In Michael Callon’s case, this is the scallops that are subject to overfishing who cannot defend themselves verbally. In our case, however, it is the academics (among many others) who will be subjected to the policy even though they have most likely never heard of it and equally cannot voice their opinions. They are not disinterested in the policy even though they may be uninterested by or unaware of it. The consultation
This is not to say that the consultation responses aren’t useful exercises for those responding to it, but that they operate at the level of hegemony rather than rational argumentation and adjudication. The public airing of consultation responses is probably just as important as the feedback that is sent directly to the policymakers. cOAlition S are not interested in adjudicating on the common ground between all ‘stakeholders’, which is a fool’s errand put forward by commercial publishers hoping to maintain the status quo. Instead, political arguments need to be made as to whose interests are most important in scholarly publishing.
(image copyright Tiny
On Rushkoff’s ‘Team Human’
My manly fare is working, my vim- and vigor-aphorisms: and verily I did not feed them with flatulent vegetables! But with warrior’s food, conqueror’s food: new appetites I have awakened (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra).
Aphorisms are punchy, direct and polemical, aiming to persuade the reader through style rather than mere content. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the aphorism is a writing style for doers, those able to act in the world and not just think about it. He likened his aphorisms to ‘warrior’s food’ in contrast to the ‘flatulent vegetables’ so often served up in philosophy. In masking a wealth of complexity, the aphorism is a tool of persuasion and a call to action.
It is unsurprising, then, that Douglas Rushkoff decides to employ the aphoristic style in his new book Team Human. Rushkoff’s many years as a writer and media theorist have themselves been a call to action for
Deploying ideas from psychology, economics and evolutionary science, Rushkoff argues that humans are naturally cohabiting and mutually reliant creatures. The original vision of the Web put forward by ‘hippies and hackers’, he argues, was reflective of this collective outlook. But digital technologies now have an ‘individualist’ and ‘repressive’ tilt caused by
Yet Team Human also intends to instigate resistance to the antihuman practices of contemporary digital technologies:
Rushkoff’s solution to the problems he describes is to use technology to our advantage to organise and reorient ourselves back to a collective, mutually-reliant situation. Part of this, he argues, requires turning to the institutions that are designed to separate us and remaking them on collective lines through shared values of ‘love, connection, justice [and] distributed prosperity’. This is not to stand in the way of progress, Rushkoff claims, but to look for new ways to share its benefits.
Despite taking great pains to critique enlightenment notions of individuality (particularly how this gives rise to the self-sufficient, economic individual as understood by capitalism), Rushkoff’s book displays many of the tendencies he criticises. This is primarily due to his steadfast adoption of ‘the human’ as his guiding principle, which for the most part goes uninterrogated (even if the notion of individualism does). Although the Enlightenment human is certainly associated with individualism, as he notes, Rushkoff falls into the trap of essentialising human ‘nature’ based on other Enlightenment values of progress, liberalism and the values listed above (love, justice and prosperity). It is precisely these values that require critiquing in any move to a new digital economy, certainly one based on transhumanist or posthumanist understandings (as Rushkoff suggests).
In basing his analysis on scientific notions of humanity, Rushkoff essentialises what it means to be human in a way that limits his overall argument. This isn’t nitpicking — the tendency to appeal to a ‘human nature’ is one that leads to many of the injustices in contemporary society, particularly because this nature is often that of the European, white male. When we appeal to humanity as a collective effort, as Rushkoff does, this should entail critique of more than just mere individualism, but of all those Enlightenment values of scientific progress, liberalism, private property. This would require abandoning the concept of ‘the human’ entirely.
Team Human‘s lack of critical awareness is exacerbated by its polemical, aphoristic style containing no references to secondary material that would usually indicate how writing is indeed an exercise in collectivity. Instead, Rushkoff performs the figure of the all-knowing individual (Enlightenment) author that he spends much of his book critiquing. He thus performs the role of the self-interested/self-determining individual despite having significant issues with it.
This is one of the main problems with much of the discourse on postcapitalist economic transformations, including platform
Perhaps only a diet of ‘flatulent vegetables’ can sustain us as we work through what it means to be human in the postdigital age…
The Radical Open Access Collective: One Year Later
Last year, during open access week, the Radical Open Access Collective re-launched with a new website, a directory of academic-led presses and an information platform for OA (book) publishing. We would like to share with you some of ROAC’s highlights for this year. Let us know if we’ve missed something or if there is anything you would like to add to this overview.
- The Radical OA Collective grew its membership substantially: at our launch in October last year we had 25+ members, our community now consists of 54 members, Open Access in Media Studies being the latest to join!
- We organised the 2nd Radical Open Access Conference at The Post Office (CPC – Coventry University) on the Ethics of Care, which was co-organised with 7 members of and/or affiliates to the Radical OA Collective. You can find more information about the conference here: http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/conferences/roa2/
- For Radical OA II we published 7 pamphlets, available during the conference in both print and OA, covering topics such as Metrics Noir, Competition and Collaboration and the Geopolitics of Open. Each pamphlet was edited by a ROAC member or affiliate. The OA versions of the pamphlets are available on the Humanities Commons platform here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/?facets[author_facet][]=Post+Office+Press
- We presented the ROAC at a number of conferences, including: COASP (Vienna), Digital Cultures (Lüneburg), Crossroads in Cultural Studies (Shanghai), OA Monographs (UUK, London), NECS Post-conference: Open Media Studies(Hilversum), Radical Open Access II (Coventry), Beyond APCs Open Aire workshop (The Hague), Open Access Tage (Dresden)
- The ScholarLed Consortium was formed by 6 members of the ROAC pooling skills and resources to develop open infrastructure, tools, workflows and processes for OA publishing: https://scholarled.org/
- We organised a bookstand together with our friends from ScholarLed which was set up at the 2nd Radical OA Conference in Coventry and at Crossroads in Cultural Studies in Shanghai. In Coventry we ran 2 short talks alongside the bookstand, and in Shanghai we organised a round table on OA publishing in Cultural Studies.
Looking forward, we hope to continue to welcome new members to the collective and develop our suite of tools to encourage and support others to start their own publishing projects. If you run a not-for-profit OA publishing initiative or are interested in starting your own scholar-led publishing project, we encourage you to join the Radical OA mailing list and get involved with the discussion!
About the ROAC
Formed in 2015, the Radical OA Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects in the humanities and social sciences. We represent an alternative open access ecosystem and seek to create a different future for open access, one based on experimenting with not-for-profit, scholar-led approaches to publishing. You can read more about the philosophy behind the collective here: https://radicaloa.co.uk/philosophy/
As a collective, we offer mutual reliance and support for each other’s projects by sharing the knowledge and resources we have acquired. Through our projects we also aim to provide advice, support and encouragement to academics and other not-for-profit entities interested in setting up their own publishing initiatives. Our website contains a Directory of academic-led presses, which showcases the breadth and rich diversity in scholar-led presses currently operating in an international context and across numerous fields, and an Information Portal with links to resources on funding opportunities for open access books, open source publishing tools, guidelines on editing standards, ethical publishing and diversity in publishing, and OA literature useful to not-for-profit publishing endeavours.
The ‘Care-full’ Commons: Open Access and the Care of Commoning
Talk given to the Radical Open Access 2 Conference in Coventry, 27 June 2018 as part of a panel on the commons and care. The talk was published as part of a pamphlet alongside pieces by Joe Deville and Tahani Nadim: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:19817/
Introduction
‘The commons’ is a term routinely employed by advocates of open access publishing to describe the ideal scholarly publishing ecosystem, one comprised entirely of freely available journal articles, books, data and code. Usually undefined, advocates invoke the commons as a good-in-itself, governed by the scholarly community and publicly accessible to all. The term itself is not associated with an identifiable politico-economic ideology, nor does it entail any particular form of organisation or practice. Without further justification, the term ‘commons’ has little meaning beyond referring to the various degrees of community control and/or accessibility associated with certain resources.
This paper will illustrate some of the uses (and abuses) of the commons in scholarly publishing, aiming to highlight both the ambiguity of the term and some of the drawbacks of treating the commons as fixed and static entity focused on the production and management of shared resources, as many do. While it certainly relates to resources and their governance, I want to reposition the commons – or ‘commoning’ specifically – as a practice of cultivating and caring for the relationships that exist around the production of shared resources. In reorienting the commons in this way, I will show how an attitude of commoning extends beyond the commons site itself and into the relationships present in other forms of organisation also. This allows us to reposition the commons towards a shared, emancipatory horizon while maintaining the need for a plurality of commons-based practices in publishing and beyond. A progressive and emancipatory commons, I argue, is therefore a space of ‘care-full commoning’.
The use and abuse of the commons
Many uses of the term commons in scholarly communications are themselves ill-defined and intend to evoke a kind of participatory, inclusive or freely accessible resource. This lack of definition may be due to the popularity of the term and its deployment in the media to describe generic ‘shared resources’, everything from Facebook (Gapper 2017) to Bicycle Rental schemes (Rushe 2017). Here, ‘the commons’ refers to resources created through purely capitalist modes of organisation that either result in freely accessible services (Facebook) or utilise public space (dockless bikes). The tragedy of each one, the authors argue, is that they are exploitable by ‘bad actors’ such as vandals or fascists, what the Financial Times journalist terms ‘polluters of common resources’ (Gapper 2017). In neither case are the companies being described as commons actually governed by the users of their service, but rather it is their perceived accessibility that leads to their exploitation. There are numerous examples of uncritical and unspecific uses of ‘commons’ like this that position the commons as a resource that has a publicly-accessible dimension to it, irrespective of its governance structures or the interactions and relationships it fosters.
A similar usage of commons terminology is on display in scholarly communications too. Digital Commons is the name given to Bepress’s flagship suite of repository and journal-hosting software. Bepress is a for-profit company, recently acquired by Elsevier, that sells publishing products to universities. There is nothing about the Digital Commons service that entails collective governance of its infrastructures or common ownership of its outputs. As part of the shareholder-managed conglomerate Elsevier, Bepress is one component in a proprietary walled garden of services designed to lock-in users and monetise their analytics and interaction data (Schonfeld 2017). The ‘commons’ in Digital Commons simply refers to a portfolio of publishing products in which many (but by no means all) of the publications on the platform are publicly accessible at no charge.
The vague and ill-defined nature of the commons allows corporations to utilise commons terminology to imply that a resource is under the control of a scholarly community rather than the company itself. This trick is only achievable because of the association between the commons and open access resources, which are interchangeable in much of the discourse on open access. In this regard, Bepress can assert their products as promoting a progressive ecosystem of freely accessible resources, even while they profit off the labour of those who produce them. But the commons is not just a resource, as Carlo Vercellone explains, but a mode of production whose basis can be identified in the ‘self-management of the organisation of labour and in the non-appropriability of the main tools of production’ (Vercellone n.d.). Focusing on the resource itself, rather than how it is produced and maintained according to democratic self-management, is likely to permit this kind of corporate capture.
The commons is not (just) a resource
The commons is not a freely accessible resource, then, but a way of producing and managing shared resources. This was the word’s original medieval meaning as used to refer to a particular form of English land. The historian Katrina Navickas explains that land commons in England and Wales were always privately owned, but that local residents (commoners) were granted certain rights of use and access by the lord of the manor (Navickas 2018). This meant that the commons were neither commonly owned nor even publicly accessible, but instead were only available to local commoners for grazing cattle, collecting fuel, wood etc. The commons did not originally entail any form of open, public access to a resource but simply refers to the collective management of certain private lands.
The conflation of open access publishing with the commons is likely based on the association of open access with open-source software and free culture. The early web played host to an array of DIY, participatory cultures of production that resulted in free digital outputs. Consequently, freely available digital resources have acquired a mythical association with participatory and commons-based forms of production, even if their forms of production are firmly embedded in capitalism. One such example of this is the Creative Commons (CC) organisation and their suite of copyright licenses for making research freely available in accordance with conditions on reuse and modifiability.
Creative Commons produces literature (e.g., Stacey and Pearson 2017) framing CC-licensed outputs as alternatives to private- or state-owned creative/scholarly works, claiming that ‘the commons sees resources as common goods, providing a common wealth extending beyond state boundaries, to be passed on in undiminished or enhanced form to future generations’ (ibid). References to the ‘values and norms’ of commoning enhance this rhetoric and affirm CC’s commitment to a new way of operating beyond market and state. Yet, despite its name and ostensible commitment to commons ideals, Creative Commons merely reflects ordinary intellectual property norms and relations. CC licenses simply designate how a proprietary work can be used; it does not confer ownership of a work to a collective or abandon the idea of private ownership of digital works altogether, nor does it entail that the means of production themselves are in common ownership. Instead, Creative Commons reinforces a private and individualist understanding of intellectual property, and the social hierarchies this entails, especially the association of published scholarship with private property that can be used as a currency for individual career progression within the university.
Creative Commons’ position on intellectual property is reflective of their broader commitment to liberal individualism and private property relations. Lawrence Lessig, one of the organisation’s founders, writes in his book on free culture that: ‘[the] free culture I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state.’ (Lessig 2004, xvi). Lessig sees Creative Commons as a set of resources operating within a capitalist economy that rely on free culture to enhance and improve the business prospects of those who share. This individualism is not only reflected in the attribution requirement for CC-licensed works, which positions the work as sole property of its creator, but it is also noticeable in much of Creative Commons’ framing of the benefits of CC-licensing to the creators, for example: ‘the fact that the name of the creator follows a CC-licensed work makes the licenses an important means to develop a reputation or, in corporate speak, a brand’ (Stacey and Pearson 2017). Creative Commons therefore utilises both the language of progressive politics mixed with the business-friendly hallmarks of branding and innovation.
Despite its influence in scholarly publishing, Creative Commons’ understanding of the ‘commons’ lacks any real meaning as a commons. Not only is CC-licensed work not common property, unlike movements that reject copyright in favour of the public domain, common- or non-ownership, it also says nothing about the ways in which the creative work was brought into being: the labour involved, the profits taken and the governance of such efforts. In order to represent a truly scholar-owned commons, the governance and/or ownership of the publication processes themselves have to at least be taken into account, not just the accessibility of digital resources.
Discussing the commons more generally, Massimo De Angelis writes: ‘The problematising of commons within a project of emancipation thus must not simply rely on lists of isolated objects [emphasis added], but must open up to the internal relations among the components of these lists and the respective commoning’ (De Angelis 2017, 67). When describing something as a commons, then, one should not just refer to the resource itself but look instead to the structures around how it is produced, reproduced and organised. This is why, as De Angelis and Stavrides highlight, a holistic understanding of the commons includes an appreciation of not just the resource (or ‘pooled resources’), but its users (‘the commoners’) and the relationships and practices involved in its maintenance and access (‘commoning’) (De Angelis and Stavrides 2010). Definitions of the commons as a resource are limited because they fail to take into account the informal practices and social relations involved between commoners. From the perspective of an emancipatory commons struggle, I will argue, it is more important to focus on commons praxis than the resource itself.
The commons as a practice
The commons is not just a series of ‘isolated objects’ but refers to the social praxis involved within and across different forms of commons organisation. It is therefore a practice focused on the relationships involved in various forms of production, rather than exclusively (or even primarily) on the resource itself. For some commons theorists such as Elinor Ostrom it is the formalised governance practices that determine these relationships. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework is one way of determining how a particular common resource is created, managed and maintained (Hess and Ostrom 2007). This framework relies on extrapolating the best rules of maintenance and access from the resource in question, presupposing a rational, consensus-building approach to the commons.
However, Ostrom’s approach to commons governance is liberal and exclusionary, treating subjects in a political vacuum rather than embedded in a particular situation and entangled in a number of different relationships and projects with asymmetrical power structures. Patrick Bresnihan argues the liberal approach to commoning fails to appreciate this attachment or ‘entangled subjectivity’ and instead treats participants in a commons as ‘calculating, liberal (human) subject[s] separated from a world of other liberal subjects and discrete, measurable (non-human) resources’ (Bresnihan 2016, 7). A similar point is made by Fred Saunders who argues that the conception of a ‘rational resource user’ in the commons fails to adequately account for a ‘meaningful consideration of local norms, values and interests in commons projects’ (Saunders 2014).
Indeed, any such ‘neutral’ approach to a commons, especially one that is agnostic (and therefore tacitly favourable) towards commercial organisations, will strive to homogenise local conditions that favour the business over the commoners. Tom Slee makes a similar point regarding software design for improving urban commons, such as those created and implemented by the Code for America organisation, that: ‘seek to force the uniqueness of individual cities into standardised frameworks in order to build software that works across many cities. The very idea of a one-size-fits-all solution to bottom-up city innovation is flawed, because every application that is successfully implemented in a large number of cities erodes the uniqueness that makes the city distinct’ (Slee 2016, 157). Large, all-encompassing commons that aim for a consensual interoperability will therefore nullify the nuanced local arrangements in favour of a simple solutions that benefit those with most power and capital.
The commons, then, is best positioned as a struggle that recognises the micro-political situations of each commons and the need for experimentation into alternatives and ways of resistance. A more historical perspective of the agricultural commons as the centre of medieval English life reveals that it has always been such a struggle. Silvia Federici illustrates how, contrary to naïve historical understandings that portray feudal society as harmonious, the medieval village was a ‘theater of daily warfare’ (Federici 2004, 26). Lords would try to limit peasant access to common land through litigation, taxation and demands that peasants carry out certain ‘labour services’ on the lord’s land (ibid). Jean Birrell describes how in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries lords were continually litigating against commoners for using more of the commons than laws permitted, despite that ‘the erosion of pastures and woodland inevitably reduced the area in which they could be exercised, while the number of commoners increased’ (Birrell 1987, 23).
So, the commons was always a struggle for particular communities to reclaim access to the land and resources traditionally managed as part of their way of life. We can extend this idea of the struggle to an understanding of the commons today, particularly in the face of privatisation of scholarly publishing, higher education and societal commons more generally. In trying to reframe open access publishing as a form of commons, it is necessary to appreciate that commoning is a practice that can operate outside of a self-defined commons site and within areas dominated by capital (and that emancipatory practices of commoning may be absent from self-described commons projects, as I have shown with Creative Commons). We see glimpses of the commons through various practices of commoning in already existing open access projects that may be latent and thus requiring drawing out and joining up.
Radical Open Access and care-full commoning
We can thus reconceive of radical open access publishing as a commons not because of the resources that radical open access publishers make available, nor even because they are governed according to any particular rules or not-for-profit philosophy, but because the presses are involved in various forms of commoning – which is to say informal practices of care, resilience and shared enterprise within and across various institutional arrangements positioned towards a shared horizon of reclaiming the common. Care in this sense is relational rather than end-directed: it is a situated practice.
Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto 1993, 103). ‘Our world’ is key here. Commoning is not prescriptive but requires us to respond to the situations of commoners rather than assuming everyone needs the same level of attention. From the perspective of publishing, this means departing from a cookie-cutter approach to open access that sets a limit on what is covered within a publishing service and what is not, much like common commercial forms of open access based on article-processing charges.
Perhaps most importantly, care as commoning exists outside of self-defined ‘commons sites’. Massimo De Angelis illustrates how commoning can manifest as forms of resistance inside factories, schools and other institutions dominated by capital (De Angelis and Stavrides 2010). We can point to the practices of teach-outs and mutual reliance on display during this year’s UCU strikes as an example commoning in the service of reclaiming higher education as a common good. Similarly, projects within the Radical Open Access Collective promote a form of commoning based on collaboration and support for each other’s projects, despite not necessarily identifying as a ‘commons’ itself. Thinking about commoning as care in this way moves away from the idea of a self-defined commons resource and towards acts of care that operate horizontally across a range of institutions. I would like to argue that the struggles for radical open access and commons-based higher education are themselves inseparable from collective forms of resistance and action towards an emancipatory but ever-evolving horizon. The commons is therefore a situated practice of care positioned towards a commons horizon.
References
Birrell, Jean. 1987. “Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conflicts in the Thirteenth Century”. Past & Present, no. 117: 22–49.
Bresnihan, Patrick. 2016. “The More-than-Human Commons: From Commons to Commoning”. Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures. New York: Routledge.
De Angelis, Massimo. 2017. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Zed Books.
De Angelis, Massimo, and Stavros Stavrides. 2010. “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides”. E-Flux, 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.
Gapper, John. 2017. “Facebook Faces the Tragedy of the Commons”. Financial Times. 29 November 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/ec74ce54-d3e1-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9.
Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons : From Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3338502.
Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press.
Navickas, Katrina. 2018. “Common Land and Common Misconceptions”. History of Public Space (blog). 2018. http://historyofpublicspace.uk/2018/02/10/common-land-and-common-misconceptions/.
Rushe, Dominic. 2017. “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Dockless Bikes and the Tragedy of the Commons”. The Guardian, 5 November 2017, sec. Politics. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/05/why-we-cant-have-nice-things-dockless-bikes-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons.
Saunders, Fred. 2014. “The Promise of Common Pool Resource Theory and the Reality of Commons Projects”. International Journal of the Commons 8 (2).
Schonfeld, Roger C. 2017. “Reflections on ‘Elsevier Acquires Bepress'”. ITHAKA S+R (blog). 2017. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/reflections-on-elsevier-acquires-bepress/.
Slee, Tom. 2016. What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Stacey, Paul, and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson. 2017. Made with Creative Commons. https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/made-with-cc.pdf.
Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
Vercellone, Carlo. n.d. “The Common as a Mode of Production. Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of Common Goods”. http://generation-online.org/c/fc_rent14.htm.
New article on scholar-led publishing
Janneke Adema and I have an article published today in Insights entitled: ‘Collectivity and collaboration: imagining new forms of communality to create resilience in scholar-led publishing’.
Abstract
The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access (OA) projects. The collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 45+ member presses and projects seeking to offer an alternative to commercial and legacy models of publishing. This article presents a case study of the collective, highlighting how it harnesses the strengths and organizational structures of not-for-profit, independent and scholar-led publishing communities by 1) further facilitating collective efforts through horizontal alliances, and by 2) enabling vertical forms of collaboration with other agencies and organizations within scholarly publishing. It provides a background to the origins of the ROAC, its members, its publishing models on display and its future plans, and highlights the importance of experimenting with and promoting new forms of communality in not-for-profit OA publishing.
You can read it here: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.399