Open Peer Review of
‘Before Progress. On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing’

Toby Steiner, 27 May 2024

Dear Jeff,

Thank you very much again for that excellent paper – a really thought-provoking piece. I very much enjoyed engaging with the text, and will definitely recommend this for publication!
I have added a couple of comments to your article document and also wanted to share some additional overarching thoughts here – which you are of course welcome to address in the paper, or ignore if you feel you don’t agree with the points raised.

One thing I tend to struggle with, first and foremost in Poynder’s bit, and thus, in extension, in your paper, is the conception of ‘community’. Poynder very easily assigns blanket labels such as ‘the OA community’ as if this were one well-organised, unified group with a clearly-defined point-of-view … in reality, though, it’s far more messy and complicated than that 😉. So I am wondering if your argument would benefit from making this a bit clearer …

Linked to the above, this also brings me to questions of delineation, i.e. would your article benefit from more clearly defining what you understand by ‘the radical OA community’? Would you see that view being represented by those involved in ROAC (the Radical OA Collective), the presses residing within the ScholarLed group of publishers, or the wider Copim community? I suppose what I am trying to say is that I believe ‘Scaling Small’ does mean different things to each of those three groups, as e. g. Copim is a bit further removed from what e.g. ROAC stands for. The Copim community thus represents a different flavour of ‘radical’ in the sense that Copim also comprises more ‘traditional’ stakeholders such as university and national libraries, infrastructure providers (e.g. OAPEN, Thoth, PKP), and social infrastructure networks / communities (e.g. Jisc & Lyrasis) … Each of those groups bring their own interpretative framework to the larger forum of what we have so far labelled the community of communities that constitutes Copim … And this umbrella of community-led publishing (which, coming back to our discussion last Thursday would, in this understanding, also comprise small to medium-sized university publishers, and is a much wider tent compared to the focus on individual scholar-led presses that you are alluding to in parts of your piece (if I understood you correctly).

So all in all, the main issue I struggled with, reading your line of argument, was the question of what you mean by ‘community’ – and this in turn makes it difficult for me to locate the resignation which you are seeing at play in parts of the radical OA community or -ies …

So my suggestion – which, just to reiterate, you are of course welcome to either take on board or ignore – would be to revisit that bit to make this clearer. Regarding the perceived resignation you note, one might argue that Scaling Small very much acknowledges the individual situatedness of scholars, who are each working in their own way to reclaim / establish / develop pockets of creative and critical resistance … And this is done while also conceding that scholars are very much embedded in the system (also via e. g. David Graeber and/or Stefano Harney & Fred Moten).

As to your point of individual presses and the case of punctum books, in my reading of Eileen Joy and Vincent van Gerven Oei’s contribution, they meant to say that no individual entity (in this case: each individual press) would seek to replicate the capitalist cookbook and mechanism of gobbling up ‘rival’ presses in the space etc, so as to emulate the established neoliberal notion of ‘Scaling Up’, i.e. growth towards oligopoly / monopoly.

The lived alternative here is a focus on ‘working to capacity’. Contrary to traditional notions of Scaling Up, by practising Scaling Small, presses such as punctum are actively choosing to remain at a size that feels workable, to keep their independence, and with that, each publisher’s unique- and quirkiness. That said, this doesn’t exclude the option of working towards establishing a network of initiatives, an alliance of independent entities that celebrates mutual collaboration and resource sharing which over time might find itself in a position to offer actual alternatives to what the commercial big players are doing. This, I believe, is the alternative approach to scaling that ‘Scaling Small’ proposes, and which we are working to put into practice via COPIM.

One additional, more formal point: I wonder if it’d be useful to more clearly signpost how your article connects to Culture Machine’s theme of ‘Publishing after Progress’, which could be done for example via your abstract and conclusion? I do see the underlying relevance that permeates your article (and really love your rallying cry for more utopias!), but maybe making that connection to the journal’s central theme more obvious to readers that are a bit further removed from these debates as we are would make this an even stronger piece. As an example, this could be done by highlighting the different notions of ‘progress’ at play in scholarly publishing (e.g. by contrasting the end of ‘progress’ in late-stage capitalist commercial publishing, and the rise of an alternative vision of ‘progress’ focusing on community-led collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and mutual care as per Scaling Small) … just an idea.

So, that’s all from me, really 😀. Let me know if you would like to discuss any of the points further – which we could do either via email, or could also jump on a video call.

Thanks so much again, Jeff, and I’m really looking forward to seeing this being published in Culture Machine!

Jefferson Pooley, 27 May 2024

Dear Toby,

Thank you so much for this very thoughtful and helpful review.

Reading over your main, bullet-point thoughts, I find myself nodding along in each case. I look forward, too, to the document-comments. Thank you for taking such care with this open review, which is my first experience as an author. I will work to incorporate these suggestions and send along to you and to Culture Machine, though of course there is no expectation that you read again.

Best, Jeff

Jefferson Pooley, 20 August 2024

Dear Toby,

Thank you again for your careful and wise review. I made a series of revisions to the manuscript on the basis of your comments.

You pointed out that my references to the ‘radical OA community’ were under-specified and arguably misleading, given the diversity and difference underneath a label that itself isn’t necessarily used by all the folks I’m referencing—including within the broad Copim community. One of the major changes I made was to include a new section (‘A Reader’s Guide to Scholarly Publishing’) after the introduction, that provides context for the reader less familiar with the scholarly publishing landscape, but also–crucially–attempts to more carefully define and defend the use of the ‘radical OA community,’ while also acknowledging the complexity that the label partially occludes.

Another point you made in your review was to gently question the claim I made for the ‘radical OA’ world’s retreat from systemic change in favour of resignation and tending to its own gardens. I agree that my claim was not sufficiently supported, and also exaggerated. I made a series of changes throughout the manuscript to rollback and qualify that claim, including in the introduction–without completing abandoning it, however. This set of changes included treating the ‘scaling small’ approach/philosophy in a more nuanced and accurate manner, per your suggestion.

You made the excellent suggestion to more directly address the Culture Machine issue theme of ‘Publishing After Progress’. I did so, especially with two new paragraphs at the end of the introduction which, then, set up passing references and allusions in the manuscript’s main sections, picked up, finally, in the conclusion.

Thank you for your suggestions to read and reference a series of additional reflections, including Sam Moore’s recent talk. I also made corrections based on a series of very helpful minor comments and fixes highlighted in your review.

I am so grateful for the careful read, which has made the piece much stronger.

Julien McHardy, 15 June 2024

Dear Jeff,

Thanks for sharing your draft. I left comments throughout the document with track change and summarize my thoughts in the following. I hope you find my comments useful. You are welcome to drop me a note if there are any points that you’d like to discuss. I am excited to see where you take this.

Best,
Julien

Thinking or practice

My main concern is that you focus overly on the power of discourse and thinking in your contribution, and pay little explicit tribute to the practices that are involved in world building. Disclosure: I am invested in practice theoretical approaches and sceptical of discourse focused analysis. That said, I think the paper would be stronger and speak more directly to the CfP if you would refer more to how utopian and realist modes are enacted through ‘editing and publishing practices.’ The work of COPIM (and mediastudies.press) provide rich material on how stuff gets done in practice (or not), and how actually doing things shifts the horizon of possibilities. Practice arguably undermines any notion of abstract progress, precisely because it is necessarily situated.

Setting the field

The current draft assumes quite a lot of inside knowledge of the publishing landscape. I suggest you add a section quite early in the paper that sets the stage and introduces the main players, and what’s at stake. In the same vein, make sure to introduce all abbreviations and concepts on first use.

Maybe cut the advertising and dedicate the space to setting the field

I feel that the part about advertising might have been necessary to work out your argument, but that it is no longer needed for the final piece. Certainly, it could be shorter. The gained space could be used to set the field and/or to develop more explicitly the idea of two kinds of realism that hinder real utopian approaches. You could make more of capitalist realism and interstitial realism as two sides of the same coin.

Situate your argument, and yourself

The CfP notes a ‘vital contrast between the abstract viewpoint of “progress thinking” and the concept of situatedness.’ Your essay, at times, makes quite broad statements, that occasionally seem to come from an abstract viewpoint, because you do not always situate who is speaking. Who is us, we, and them is not always clear. I think that going through the paper and situating the argument and your own position more carefully would strengthen it. Why do we not know you started mediastudies.press? Referring more to practices and less to discourse, in my opinion, would also help to do that.

Jefferson Pooley, 20 August 2024

Dear Julien,

Thank your for this very helpful and insightful review, which has led me to reflect, and then make major revisions on the basis of your comments on suggestions. I really appreciate the careful read, including the detailed specific comments on the Word document [not reproduced here].

You recommended that I situate myself, as a participant in scholar-led publishing and in various other ways, explicitly, early in the manuscript. The issue is that by leaving those biographical, situated facts out, I risked presenting an abstract view-from-nowhere. I agree completely. In a new section after the introduction (‘A Reader’s Guide to Scholarly Publishing’) I situate myself in a short paragraph (‘In this essay, I address the community as a member…’) and otherwise sought to avoid an Olympian voice. This same section attempts to address the assumed knowledge that the first draft demanded about the scholarly publishing landscape and what is at stake. So here I attempt to provide, in capsule form, an overview that is intended, among other things, to orient the reader who may not be familiar with its main contours.

Another sharp and helpful suggestion was to cut the material on Michael Schudson’s advertising-centric version of ‘capitalist realism’, on the grounds that it may not be doing important work for the argument and that cutting might free up space for a sharper focus on the two kinds of hobbling realism, capitalist and interstitial.

I wrestled with this suggested cut, and produced a version with the Schudson material excised. Ultimately I decided to restore the treatment, because I judged that the thread about commercial-publisher cooptation that it set up was important to establish. Still, I took the point about the two realisms to heart: You pulled out the core of the essay in a way that I had overlooked. Your observation about these two forms of realism as ‘two sides of the same coin’ hit me like a revelation, something I hadn’t quite realised myself. As a result, I was able to introduce and then otherwise sign-post the twin realisms of capitalist and interstitial in a more direct way at various points in the essay, including in the last couple of paragraphs of the new ‘Reader’s Guide’ section.

Your first and most difficult to address comment refers to my emphasis on discourse and thinking, at the expense of practices—which, as you note, may in themselves broaden the horizon of possibilities. The claim is that I ascribe too much efficacy and importance to ideas, both in producing the resignation I highlight, and also by way of my suggestions about ‘utopian thinking’. I thought about this point a lot, including as it relates to my more typical line of scholarship on the history of social science in general and of media and communication research in particular. Much of the work I admire most in the broader history of science, as well as in adjacent formations like STS, reflects this emphasis on practices. I realised, through your point about practices, how unrelentingly ideas-focused this piece is.

The way I decided to address this was to pick up a suggestion that both you and Toby made, about more directly responding to the ‘Publishing After Progress’ Culture Machine call, which itself makes reference to practices and draws an explicit contrast to the ‘abstract viewpoint of “progress thinking”’. My tack is, in effect, to deny the contrast—to claim that ‘Progress thinking—with its utopian scheming about a different publishing world—is perfectly compatible with situated practices and experimentation’. My view is that both ideas and practices have efficacy in the world, with the former’s importance hinging on the way in which talk/discourse helps bring about the world it purports to merely describe. So I decided to stick with my focus on ideas, discourse, and thinking, on the conviction that these really do matter, for the space-opening reasons I attempt to articulate—while also, in this revision, acknowledging the importance of practices.

I also made a series of smaller revisions based on your changes-tracked comments and fixes, including a number related to very helpful attentiveness to the specific wording and use of metaphor.
Thank you for the careful, thoughtful read and attention, to both the broader arc and argument of the essay and to its sentence-level work, which have greatly strengthened the essay.