From: Samuel A. Moore
Sent: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 11:15 AM
To: Rebekka Kiesewetter; Sarah Kember
Subject: RE: Initiating the open peer-review process for Culture Machine ‘Publishing after Progress’ – Sarah meet Sam, Sam meet Sarah

Dear Rebekka and Sarah,

Thanks – all received! I’ll look forward to reading this soon and will send Sarah an email over the next week with some thoughts and suggestions. Sarah – please do let me know in the meantime if there’s anything specific you’re looking for from me.
All the best,
Sam

From: Sarah Kember
Sent: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 11:20 AM
To: Samuel A. Moore; Rebekka Kiesewetter
Subject: Re: Initiating the open peer-review process for Culture Machine ‘Publishing after Progress’ – Sarah meet Sam, Sam meet Sarah

Hi Sam

Thanks for this. I found it hard to find out how some of the commercial publishers are regulated. Anything you have on this would be particularly welcome.

Cheers
Sarah

From: Samuel A. Moore
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2024 1:54 PM
To: Sarah Kember
Subject: RE: Initiating the open peer-review process for Culture Machine ‘Publishing after Progress’ – Sarah meet Sam, Sam meet Sarah

Hi Sarah,

I’ve now read (and thoroughly enjoyed) your essay and have a few comments below.

Your piece gets to the heart of the tension between the aims of ‘open access’ – i.e., free access to research – and the more progressive aim to use open access for more radical or progressive purposes. There has always been a question around the extent to which radical open access advocates should associate themselves with the broader movement that is based on free access to resources irrespective of the commercial means that produce them. Clearly it helps to market a project as ‘open access’ in order to obtain funding for these projects (such as how COPIM has done), but possibly our tacit support of the broader open access movement was at the expense of commercial publishing houses furthering their dominance through the platformisation you describe.

I think your invocation of ‘householding’ offers a productive way of working through this tension. I’d be interested to hear how you think initiatives like the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) fit into this idea? We tried to politicise open access through the ROAC by foregrounding collaboration, non-commercial approaches and mutual reliance. It feels to me like this is a kind of householding that facilitates collective flourishing. We started from the position that the presses (including Goldsmiths, as you know) are scholar-led, but I don’t think we’re particularly ideological or dogmatic about the open access requirement. The problem with the Collective, however, is that its looseness and informality meant it has never got to enact its politics in the way you’re describing. With the COPIM (and Open Book Futures) project, the formality has forced a degree of professionalisation which seems to necessitate a more rigid open access business model (to the exclusion of other approaches). I don’t think they would have received funding without the open access requirement, which is more of a reflection of the funders (UKRI and Arcadia) than anything else.

I completely agree that regulation cannot get us very far here, although I’m not sure how the bigger publishers are currently regulated. There was an appeal a few years ago to the EU competition authority asking them to intervene in the monopolistic practices of scientific publishers, but nothing ever came of it. I very much believe that editorial board resignations do hold a great deal of promise for collective governance of publishing, although the problem with so many resignations is that the editors don’t really know what to do once they have resigned. A recent case is the journal of Imaging Neuroscience which resigned from Elsevier over high APC prices and then started a different journal with lower APCs prices, rather than questioning the APC model altogether. It is here that the repoliticisation of publishing could help.

But coming full circle, I do think one of the ways to counter the commercial stranglehold on publishing is to tone down the open access requirement and make it messier and less focused on gold vs. green, open vs closed, etc, so it’s not so easily capture-able by big publishers. Your final sentence is perfect: ‘An alternative, ecological economics of scholarly publishing is possible and is neither about, or not about, open access per se. It rests on a refusal of the current technocratic consensus and a return to publishing as politics.’ I feel like I’m more optimistic than you are around whether open access helped or hindered this cause, although I completely agree that ‘openness’ itself is not the main aim of any new and ethical system of publishing.

I have a few questions that might be worth considering, but have no specific recommendations for revisions:

• Is my and Janneke’s idea of ‘scaling small’ of use here? We argue that it is possible to build a resilient network of scholar-led publishers by weaving ourselves together and becoming more mutually reliant in the process. Or is the idea of scaling (however small) too polluted by growth thinking?
• Would some of these more radical approaches to open access publishing not have gotten traction if it weren’t for the ‘open access’ movement? For example, the ‘new’ university press landscape you describe has been partly supported by the turn to open access – through block-grant funding and associated senior level support – which might not have ? Is there an argument that it makes sense to take what we can from the OA movement or is that moment now passed?
• Was the increased commercial capture and disintermediation you describe inevitable irrespective of the broader push for open access? My feeling is that the landscape would look pretty much the same at the commercial end even without processing charges and transformative agreements. I might be wrong though and maybe it doesn’t matter.
Thanks again for a wonderful piece. I’d be happy to talk further about any of this. Hope it helps.

Sam

From: Sarah Kember
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2024 11:10 AM
To: Samuel A. Moore
Subject: Re: Initiating the open peer-review process for Culture Machine “Publishing after Progress” – Sarah meet Sam, Sam meet Sarah

Hi Sam

Thanks so much for these thoughtful and insightful comments. They’re really interesting and helpful.

Much for me to think about. You’re right, of course, about how funding requirements for open access publishing have tied people’s hands. Perhaps that in itself is one reason to open out from openness a bit more.

The Radical Open Access Collective is a very close fit for what I’m getting at. My only caveat is the one that you point out. The political potential is there, but how to activate it in loose, inclusive coalitions? Even the federation of feminist journal editors is struggling to get going, partly because of the international differences I signal but also because the antagonistic route is so difficult. Not everyone can, or even wants to resign from a journal they’ve been working on for years. And as you say, what do you do then? I’d love to put Goldsmiths Press behind a whole new approach to journal publishing (a top to bottom reevaluation) but I don’t have the staff or the infrastructure. There’s a next level of collaboration that’s needed but I don’t think we’ve mapped it out yet, and who knows if its really possible.

I really like your scaling small article. It gets to the values I want to prioritise, but like degrowth, I’m not sure its enough of a strategy in itself. Like householding, it describes something we’re already doing, only perhaps a bit too quietly. We need to get louder, distinguish ourselves from the commercial publishers and link up with activists looking for a new kind of house. Whether or not we can do this under the banner of open access publishing is a really fine, really significant question of strategy. Mouffe argues that you can’t have a contest standing on different bits of ground, so perhaps its really about surfacing the radical over the openness. But for me the open access movement as a whole has accelerated the commercial capture of publishing by means of a technocratic consensus. We can break that with radical politics, but not, I fear, through more openness.

Thanks for the links and thanks again for some really though-provoking suggestions.

All best for now
Sarah