Distributed, Radical and Resilient: Speculations on a Community-Led Future for Open Access Publishing

Open access publishing is finally gaining ground. Yet with its rise to prominence questions emerge about its implementation, where it is a certain type of APC or BPC-supported open access that is increasingly being adapted by commercial publishers and funders alike to support the publication process. In addition to this, many of the publishers currently adopting open access do so not so much to support a radical alternative to the business ethics underlying scholarly communication, but to explore APCs as a profitable business model. Here open access is being made to serve the need for further commercialisation of knowledge and research. Yet for others open access has always been about more than just providing free access to scholarly content at the point of consumption: it has been about moving towards a fair, ethical, scholar-focused publishing system; about offering counter-institutional alternatives to the large, established, commercial firms; about a continuous rethinking of the material practices and social relations underlying scholarly communication. In this talk I will explore notions of resiliency and distribution and the benefits of community knowledge production, promoting the commons. I will discuss the Radical Open Access Collective and the growing movement of scholar-led presses in the humanities, initiated within a community setting to challenge commercial hegemonies, to provide a real ethical alternative—bottom-up, pluralistic and community-led—and to stimulate diversity, criticality and creativity in the publishing ecosystem. The diverse set of practices they represent reflects a vision in which open access should be understood not as a homogeneous project striving to become a dominant model, nor as a concept with a pre-described meaning or ideology, but as a project with an unknown outcome engaged in a continuous series of critical struggles.