OA Without Tears: Platforms and Workflows for Actually Equitable Open Scholarly Communication

The many colors and flavors of open-access currently in circulation have obfuscated two key issues: first, that one of the originating goals of the open access movement was creating greater equity by reducing the stranglehold that extractive corporations have developed over scholarly publishing; and second, that the dominant OA publishing mechanisms that have since emerged have if anything reduced equity, by attaching high fees to the formats that allow publications to circulate most widely. If actually equitable scholarly communication is our goal, we need to begin again, rethinking our platforms and workflows -- and above all, the ownership and governance of those platforms and workflows -- to allow for more meaningful scholar-led practices. This presentation will focus on work being done by Humanities Commons to develop open, collective, equitable communication processes that can give all scholars agency over the ways that work in their fields circulates.