Can STS help transform scholarly publishing? Lessons from infrastructuring the Open Book Collective

This presentation was delivered at EASST-4S, on 19 July 2024. The paper abstract was as follows:

This paper critically reflects on the work undertaken to establish the Open Book Collective (OBC), a digital platform and charity that, since its launch in 2022, has already reconfigured some key socio-economic relations surrounding the publishing and circulation of book-length scholarship. It was established as part of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project and is at the heart of its successor project: Open Book Futures. Both aim to help deliver a fairer, more bibliodiverse future for open access book publishing. One unusual feature of the OBC is that from the start its design has been informed by key STS principles, including engaging directly with the politics of infrastructures and the politics of platforms. These principles have been brought to bear in an endeavour that involves new collaborations between scholars, librarians and open access publishers and infrastructure providers. As one of the co-creators of the OBC, Deville reflects on how engaging in this work of ‘infrastructuring’, while also bringing together these different components of the higher education ecosystem, sheds new light on how we might want to understand the political and practical challenges of building different futures for higher education, in the context of the rise of so-called ‘edutech’ and increasing logics of financialization and assetization. The paper argues that STS needs to grapple better with that small but increasingly active part of academic work itself directly involved in digital infrastructure building and efforts to engage with, and respond to, ongoing transformations in scholarly publishing.

Joe Deville is PI on the Open Book Futures project.