As a 2024-5 Open Future Fellow, I explored AI across the research and publishing lifecycle. The output of this research is available as a report here:  https://openfuture.eu/publication/governing-the-scholarly-ai-commons  Summary:  In recent years, commercial publishers and information analytics companies have increased their reliance on AI-based technologies to conduct a range of tasks across the research lifecycle.

New report on governing the scholarly AI commons

Samuel Moore

Open access policy mandates have never been an effective way of convincing researchers of the benefits of exploring alternative, open publishing practices. Forcing someone to do something will not help them engage with the reasons for doing it. Instead, the mandate feels like a simple tickbox exercise that can be ignored once fulfilled.

Nothing to lose but our tiny royalty cheques: on the proposed open access books policy for the next REF

I’ve just uploaded ‘The Politics of Rights Retention’ to my Humanities Commons site: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:52287/. The article is a preprint of a commentary currently under consideration for a special issue on open access publishing.

 Abstract

This article presents a commentary on the recent resurgence of interest in the practice of rights retention in scholarly publishing.

New preprint: the politics of rights retention

How does the word ‘open’ modify terms such as ‘data’, ‘source’ ‘access’ and ‘science’? What is openness actually

 doing

to these terms? This seems to be a subject of continual debate on social media, at conferences and in the scholarly literature. For the most part, it seems that the debate has moved on from the idea that there can be a strict definition of open access, data, etc.

Why &#8216;open science&#8217; is actually pretty good politics

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

 Abstract:

Open access publishing (OA) not only removes price and permission restrictions to academic research, but also represents an opportunity to reassess what publishing means to the humanities.

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

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.

No amount of open access will fix the broken job market

A recent article in

 The Scientist

discusses the newly launched Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS). Composed of ‘leaders’ from over 75 US colleges and universities, HELIOS is committed to incentivising open science practices in order to make research more research more ‘inclusive, transparent, and efficient’. It is an approach designed to reorient assessment mechanisms towards open science practices,

How does open science &#8216;democratise&#8217; and &#8216;collectivise&#8217; research?

I’m becoming increasingly interested in the academic literature on predatory publishing, especially the differing definitions and argumentative strategies these articles use to illustrate the problem of poor-quality publishing.

An illustration of the problem with the literature on predatory publishing

As rumours circulate about the forthcoming UKRI open access policy announcement, fierce lobbying is underway by publishers worried that the policy may undermine their business models. Elsevier has even taken the step of directly emailing their UK-based academic editors to criticise the rumoured policy and encourage academics to relay the publisher’s views to UKRI.

The future relationship between university and publisher

My manly fare is working, my vim- and vigor-aphorisms: and verily I did not feed them with flatulent vegetables! But with warrior’s food, conqueror’s food: new appetites I have awakened

(Nietzsche,

 Thus Spake Zarathustra

). Aphorisms are punchy, direct and polemical, aiming to persuade the reader through style rather than mere content.

On Rushkoff&#8217;s &#8216;Team Human&#8217;

Janneke Adema and I have an article published today in

 Insights

entitled: ‘Collectivity and collaboration: imagining new forms of communality to create resilience in scholar-led publishing’.

 Abstract

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access (OA) projects.

New article on scholar-led publishing

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.

Library Band EP

It is common knowledge that the academic publishing industry is oligopolistic: a handful of large corporate publishers control the vast majority of the industry. Because it dominates so much of the industry, the oligopoly maintains market power through tentacular economies of scale and control of the publications which libraries must access.

All publishers great and small

Originally posted on the LSE Impact Blog

The production and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is unquestionably good news and hopefully heralds the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. Much of this progress is down to the spirit of collaboration shown by scientists around the world in the race to beat the virus.

Look to the commons for the future of R&#038;D and science policy

Today Janneke Adema and I published a new article in the journal

 New Formations

entitled ‘‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’: Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing within the University’. The article will be available in our repositories but is also currently freely accessible via the

 New Formations

site: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformations/vol-2023-issue-110/abstract-9909/ (although I’m not

New article in New Formations on supporting editorial labour for ethical publishing within the university

In the past week, three senior research strategy figures at the University of Oxford have called for removing the open access ‘burden’ from the rules for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). For the past REF excercise, open access has been a requirement for all submitted journal articles and UKRI are also now consulting on plans to include books within the rules for the next exercise.

Should open access be removed from REF requirements?

(Cross-posted on the ScholarLed blog)  I write a lot about scholar-led publishing. My thesis explored the differences between scholar-led and policy-based forms of open access, and I’ve recently published an article about early academic-led experiments in e-journal publishing.

Open *By* Whom? On the Meaning of ‘Scholar-Led’

I’m guest editing a special issue for the

 Journal of Electronic Publishing

on open research for the humanities and social sciences. The call for papers is below:

 Call for papers: Special Issue on Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences

CFP: special issue of JEP on open research for the humanities and social sciences

This a repost of a piece Janneke Adema and I wrote on Radical OA for the LSE Impact Blog:

This week saw the launch of a new website for the Radical Open Access Collective, a vibrant community of presses, journals, publishing projects, and organisations all invested in not-for-profit and scholar-led forms of academic publishing.

The Radical Open Access Collective: building alliances for a progressive, scholar-led commons

Talk given to the Radical Open Access 2 Conference in Coventry, 27 June 2018 as part of a panel on the commons and care.

The ‘Care-full’ Commons: Open Access and the Care of Commoning

Today’s

 Scholarly Kitchen

blog post is an attempt by David Crotty — the blog’s editor — to quantify the increasing consolidation of the academic publishing industry. Crotty concludes: It’s helpful to have more data on the increasing power that a small number of academic publishers hold.

What&#8217;s so bad about consolidation in academic publishing?

On 22

 nd

September I’ll be participating in a panel on funding and business mechanisms for equitable open access for the 2020 OASPA conference.

OASPA panel on funding and business mechanisms for equitable open access

Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference:
 
 “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”,
 
 April 20th 2023

Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale.

How to cultivate good closures: ‘scaling small’ and the limits of openness

Cross-posted on the Dariah Open blog as part of their series on research assessment in the humanities and social sciences

In his lecture entitled ‘The future of the profession or the university without condition’, Jacques Derrida makes the case for a university dedicated to the ‘principle right to say everything, whether it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to

Research assessment in the university without condition

Cross-posted on the University of Cambridge’s Unlocking Research blog.

In the USA last Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced its decision to mandate public access to all federally funded research articles and data.

Thoughts on the new White House OSTP open access memo

The UKRI open access consultation deadline is this Friday and we’re likely to see a flurry of responses leading up to it. One response to the consultation caught my eye today from the Friends of Coleridge, a society that ‘exists to foster interest in the life and works of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle’. I wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts on this because I think it represents something quite interesting about the way that

How can we understand the different effects of UKRI&#8217;s open access policy on small learned societies in the humanities?

On February 26th, what feels like a lifetime ago now, the Los Angeles Times published a column with the headline ‘COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model.

On February 26

 th

, what feels like a lifetime ago now, the

 Los Angeles Times

published a column with the headline ‘COVID-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model.

COVID-19 and the future of open access

When the original BOAI declaration on open access was published, one of its stated aims was to ‘save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time’ through open access publishing.

How the academic publishing oligopoly skews debates on the cost of publishing

Open access is a movement constituted by conflict and disagreement rather than consensus and harmony.

The politics of open access in action

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.

Plan S: how open access can nurture new positive and collective forms of ‘academic freedom’

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

New article – A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

I’ve just published a preprint on

 F1000 Research

of a new article on community-led publishing projects at the University of Cambridge. It’s co-authored with Dr. Mandy Wigdorowitz at the University of Alabama. Title: “I just very much love the journal”:

New preprint on community-led publishing

Reforming research assessment and culture is a hot topic in higher education, particularly how these issues relate to research funding. I discussed the HELIOS initiative in my last post, which is a funder-led approach to incentivising open science practices in North American tenure and promotion guidelines. Now, in the past week, EU science ministers have agreed on a plan to facilitate coordinated reform of research assessment processes.

Why open science is primarily a labour issue

Last week,

 The Scholarly Kitchen

posted an article by Angela Cochran,Vice President of Publishing at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, about the inability of publishers to deal with research fraud. She writes: Cochran’s argument is that although publishers manage the peer review process, it was never an expectation of peer review that they would perform ‘forensic analysis’ of datasets and associated materials.

Research integrity, preprints and where should the responsibility lie?

This post makes a case for universities investing in people and processes for reviewing research in house before publication. This idea has no doubt been proposed before and is probably already a feature of some academic institutions, but I wanted to clarify here why I think it would benefit academic research.

High-energy physics research is often held up as the archetypal open science discipline.

How to shed light on in-house publication review processes?

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.

Radical Open Access Collective

As early-career researchers, one of the first things we are told about publishing is not to release our research as part of an edited volume. Chapters in edited volumes are not nearly as valued for career progression as journal articles, even though they may take the same amount of time and care to produce.

Edited volumes and low-risk open access

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.

Plan S: is there another way?

The Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) is a not-for-profit learned society composed of 35,000 members from across the globe.

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.

Resisting Amazon&#8217;s influence on open access publishing

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of 60+ not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. One of the aims of the collective is to legitimise scholar-led publishing as an important alternative model for open access, while supporting our members and encouraging others to experiment with scholar-led publishing too.

Governing the scholarly commons: the Radical Open Access Collective

The term ‘predatory publisher’ reveals a limit of language – or rather it asks too much of language. It seeks a binary separation between ‘predatory’ and ‘non-predatory’ where no such separation can exist, ultimately illustrating more about the motivations and hidden biases about the accuser than the supposedly predatory journal at hand. We therefore need another way to conceptualise the practices that predatory publishing seeks to describe.

The undecidable nature of predatory publishing

Yesterday, the preprint repositories bioRxiv/medRxiv and arXiv released coordinated statements on the recent memo on open science from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. While welcoming the memo, the repositories claim that the ‘rational choice’ for making research immediately accessible would be to mandate preprints for all federally funded research.

Preprints and the futures of peer review

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.

New preprint: scholar-led publishing and the pre-history of the open access movement

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.

Plan S: academic freedom and statements of principle

I’m currently prepping to teach an article by Jean-Baptiste Michel and colleagues (paywalled) that presents an early (if not the first) analysis of the content digitised as part of the Google Books project. I ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to understand how the 25+ million books were actually scanned, as it wasn’t immediately clear.

Google Books and labour erasure in the digital humanities

If you’re at all interested in open access publishing, you probably know that it has a long and complicated history. There are disagreements and differences over strategies, tactics, politics, definitions, motivations, disciplinary approaches, business models and routes to OA. Many words have been spilled over the ‘mess’ that open access has become and the fact that the concept of open access itself has a number of different lineages.

Who are these &#8216;open access advocates&#8217;?

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

Briefing Paper: Open Access Monographs

As this feels like the first day in a while that I have enough concentration to write, I thought I’d take the opportunity to jot down some thoughts guided by the question: what on earth can the pandemic teach us about open access to knowledge? I say this because I don’t have any idea just yet.

Notes on open access and COVID-19

I’ve just published the article ‘Open Access, Plan S and ‘Radically Liberatory’ Forms of Academic Freedom’ in the journal

 Development and Change

. Abstract below. Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12640 Abstract This opinion piece interrogates the position that open access policies infringe academic freedom.

New article in Development and Change

I have recently had an article published in the

 Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

(JASIST) entitled ‘Revisiting “the 1990s debutante”: Scholar‐led publishing and the prehistory of the open access movement’. The article explores a small number of early scholar-led e-journals and their relevance to open access today.

New publication in JASIST

Why is there an association between open access publishing and ‘the commons’? What is it about the two concepts that implies they are linked? I’m currently researching the relationship between the commons and OA, looking specifically at the application of the literature of the former to our understanding of the latter, and it is not immediately obvious why the two are so connected.

What is the relationship between the commons and open access publishing?

In the last few years, there has been a marked shift in the debate on open access publishing from a focus on (mere) outputs to one on infrastructures. With terms such as ‘community-led’, ‘the commons’ and ‘governance’ regularly bandied about, advocates for OA are increasingly looking away from commercial publishers and towards infrastructures designed by and for a more accountable set of stakeholders.

Standardisation and difference: the challenges of infrastructures for open access

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.

Revisiting the present future of scholarly communication: Bill Readings and the birth of online publishing

Last year, during open access week, the Radical Open Access Collective re-launched with a new website, a directory of academic-led presses and an information platform for OA (book) publishing. We would like to share with you some of ROAC’s highlights for this year. Let us know if we’ve missed something or if there is anything you would like to add to this overview.

The Radical Open Access Collective: One Year Later

On October 25th I’ll be giving an online talk at University College Cork for their event on New Horizons in Open Access Publishing.

New Horizons in Open Access Publishing: upcoming Open Access Week talk

UK Research and Innovation today published its updated policy on open access. For journals, the policy is simplified and normalised across the disciplines. Immediate open access under CC BY is mandated (with exceptions considered on a case-by-case basis), meaning no embargoes for green open access. Hybrid publishing will not be funded by UKRI where the journal in question does not have a transitional agreement.

What does the UKRI policy mean for open access book publishing?

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the Plan S open access policy consultation process. I explored what I feel is the purpose of policy consultations, arguing that they are not radical or deliberative democratic exercises but are instead intended to confer a sense of legitimacy to top-down policy mandates:  In essence, policy consultations are about tweaking and window-dressing.

Plan S: what&#8217;s the point of policy consultations? (part 2)

Transformative agreements are an increasingly common way for universities and consortia to shift publisher business models towards open access. They do this through a prearranged payment that allows institutions to access subscription content while allowing future research to published in an openly accessible form.

The datafication in transformative agreements for open access publishing

This week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) declared 2023 its ‘Year of Open Science‘, announcing ‘new grant funding, improvements in research infrastructure, broadened research participation for emerging scholars, and expanded opportunities for public engagement’. This announcement builds on the OSTP’s open access policy announcement last year that will require immediate open access to federally-funded research from

The curious internal logic of open access policymaking

The highly prestigious journal

 Nature

this week announced that it is going to be publishing all peer reviews alongside the articles it publishes. This means that the reviews attached to each publication will be available for all to read, although reviewer identities will remain anonymous unless they opt to sign their review.

Transparency as a substitute for governance: on Nature&#8217;s open review process

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.