The new and updated website for the Radical Open Access Collective website is now live!

https://radicaloa.co.uk

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. The current 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. We will be further developing this into a toolkit for open access publishing in order 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!

Please do get in touch if you would like further information on the project or would like your publishing project to be involved.

I have a new article published in Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication (French Information and Communication Sciences Review). The piece is entitled ‘A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research’ and looks at the various histories and lineages of OA to argue that it is best understood as a boundary object rather than a concept with a fixed definition or entailing a specific approach.

You can read it here: https://rfsic.revues.org/3220

The article is part of an issue on open science and open access (‘Libre accès aux publications et sciences ouvertes en débat’), which features some really interesting work from a range of researchers working in both French and English.

 

 

I recently wrote a briefing paper for Open Knowledge and PASTEUR4OA on open-access monographs. You can read it here.

In 2008 the Library Band recorded five songs in this cottage:

The Library Band was a four-piece ensemble whose members were either Book Movers or Book Fetchers at Cambridge University Library (yes, those are actual job titles). We played instrumental folky music composed of flute, accordion, oboe, xaphoon, and acoustic guitar.

I’ve just found out that we will be releasing the songs as a special 10″ EP. More to follow…