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

Continue reading “Common Struggles: Policy-based vs. scholar-led approaches to open access in the humanities (thesis deposit)”

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 single author before and I thought it would be an interesting experiment.

You can read it here: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/gty2-w177

Continue reading “New preprint: scholar-led publishing and the pre-history of the open access movement”

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 or knowledge for its own sake, but is instead a corporation driven by the pursuit of ‘excellence’ as defined by rankings and profits. Higher education’s emphasis on excellence has only grown more pernicious since the book was published, something my co-authors and I explored in a paper a few years ago.

Sadly, Bill Readings died in a plane crash before the publication of his monograph aged just 34. This year marks 25 years since his death.*

Continue reading “Revisiting the present future of scholarly communication: Bill Readings and the birth of online publishing”

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 framed as a ‘showcase’ for a university’s research quality. In trying to change behaviour towards openness, people are more easily motivated out of self-interest than mere altruism.

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 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?”

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”

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’”

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 and intimidation against academics who question or disagree with their governments. Incidents are filed under the following categories:

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 the Plan S consultation process I explored the function of policy consultations, arguing that they are not really an exercise in deliberative democracy but more about justifying the impacts of the policy instrument to certain powerful stakeholders. Having (rightly) been accused of cynicism in a few places, I’ve also been asked what the alternative might be. How is it possible to hold a consultation that fairly takes into account all relevant opinions?

Clearly the answer is that this is not possible. The very idea of open access arises out of conflict and antagonism between numerous points of view. Many of these antagonisms are irreconcilable and the search for common ground is misguided at best (and willful obfuscation at worst). For example, one of the significant motivations for OA is the business practices of multinational, for-profits like Elsevier, as the Cost of Knowledge Boycott demonstrates. How is it possible to promote a form of OA that appeases both Elsevier and those in opposition to Elsevier’s profit margin?

But understandings of open access — and publishing more generally — are not unified between academics themselves. This is where much-used phrases like ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ come in. Publishing means very different things to different groups and any policy-based approach to OA that isn’t sensitive to these differences will result in the imposition of one group’s understanding of publishing onto another’s. OA mandates are blunt instruments that can have a homogenising effect if they’re not sensitive to particular ways of working.

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 and resonances that are incommensurate with one another, even though ‘accessible research’ is understandable across community boundaries.

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 ‘standardise‘ the boundary object according to one particular perspective, which has real potential to nullify its community-specific features. Here, I argue, OA becomes less about collaboration and boundary object creation and more about interessement and stakeholder management (as per my previous post). And stakeholder management always benefits the stakeholders with the most power (commercial publishers in this case).

But this doesn’t mean that policy instruments cannot be used to stimulate good initiatives and progressive outcomes. Too often, organisations hide behind their objection to a policy so as to protect their prestige and avoid doing anything at all. Publishing is broken in many ways and it will require a variety of different experiments to help transform it. I therefore maintain that mandates are not a good idea and that OA policies should be used to stimulate scholar-, library- and university press-led approaches to OA that explore its radical potential to promote difference and collaboration for responsible and ethical forms of publishing.

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.

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 saying the same thing in a variety of ways), I realised I’d lost sight of what the consultation was supposed to achieve. So what is the point of open access policy consultations?

At first glance, consultations are an opportunity for organisations and individuals to shape a particular policy intervention through their responses. The architects of Plan S have granted the public an opportunity to voice their concerns with the expectation that these concerns are both heard and taken onboard in the resulting policy. This reading appeals to liberal-democratic notions of governance that assume the correct way to proceed will prevail, or that a compromise can be reached, if people can air their grievances through open and frank exchange of ideas.

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 PhD thesis, I looked at the creation of the HEFCE policy for open access for the next Research Excellence Framework. From reading a number of the consultation responses, and interviewing one of the policymakers at HEFCE, it became clear to me that the consultation was used to position actors in blocs so as to justify certain elements of the policy. For example, HEFCE were able to point to the consultation responses from learned societies and commercial publishers in order to make the case for a longer embargo length, even though many responses from different actors argued that embargos should be shorter. Learned societies and publishers were positioned by HEFCE as two different kinds of actors (the voices of academics and publishers) even though they both have a financial interest in the profits of the academic publishing industry. The consultation was thus used to justify (rather than reform) certain elements of the policy in accordance with the wishes of certain actors. The divergent responses to the consultation are helpful because they allow policymakers to cherrypick evidence that can make the policy more acceptable and seem more thought through.

From the perspective of cOAlition S, we might think of the policy consultation as an example of what Michael Callon termed interessement. In his influential article on the scallop fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay, Callon argues that power in a network works according to the extent that actors can successfully negotiate the interests of each other. They do this by problematising the issue at hand in such a way as to make it palatable to all actors in the network. Yet this is not a purely consensual process and operates according to different alliances and forms of exclusion. cOAlition S are thus able to point to the consultation responses of certain actors as representative of something broader, while simultaneously ignoring those of other actors. The consultation is most useful for the policymakers, then, as it facilitates this process (while simultaneously having the appearance of democracy in action).

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 therefore allows cOAlition S to understand how the policy can be best framed so as to enroll the most important actors as allies to their cause and give it a sense of legitimacy. The consultation process is not necessarily about changing the policy, but about understanding how it can be made palatable to the most important ‘stakeholders’ that will be impacted by it.

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 Snek Comics).