OA Without Tears

Platforms and Workflows for Actually Equitable Open Scholarly Communication

Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
OAI13
6 September 2023

Note: I want to start today by thanking Frank and Wouter for inviting me to speak today as part of this session on Diamond Open Access. I'm going to start today by raising a few issues that have been worrying me with respect to the present course of open access, before sharing a bit of what my colleagues and I have been trying to do about it.

social and epistemic justice
communities of practice
community-led decision making
public investment

Note: I want to start today by pulling out a few common threads in the prior talks: - a need to focus on social and epistemic justice in ways that center communities of practice - a need to design and develop trustworthy publicly-owned and governed open infrastructure that is flexible enough to serve those widely varying communities of practice - the importance of ensuring that decision-making about publishing and its processes are led by the communities those publications serve - and underlying all of this the need to secure public investment in truly open initiatives at all levels, in order to ensure that scholarly communication can become actually equitable

Why is this necessary?

Note: Why is this work -- and this panel -- necessary? - open access in its many present flavors has done a lot to make more research available to be read online, but it has done little to reduce the stranglehold that extractive corporations have developed over research and publishing processes - in fact, the development of new models such as "read and publish" and new infrastructures such as discovery engines and research information management systems have only increased corporate lock-in, and not incidentally increased corporate profits as well

budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/

Note: even worse, for a movement that was founded more than 20 years ago in order to make it possible -- as the Budapest statement said -- to "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge," the dominant open access publishing mechanisms that have since emerged have if anything reduced equity, by attaching high fees to the formats and platforms that allow publications to circulate most widely - scholars whose fields, institutions, or nations do not have ready access to grant funding or other means of subsidizing publishing fees thus get silenced, closed out of participation in sharing their learning - and the discounts and scholarships other fee waivers offered by publishers only serve to normalize a model in which it is considered correct for those who produce knowledge pay corporations to circulate it

Wait, what?

Note: So what do I mean by that? - "the way things are done" is a deeply ingrained aspect of culture, and as Peter Drucker or Jack Welch or any number of other business writers have been quoted as saying

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Note: "culture eats strategy for breakfast" -- which is to say that the normalized, unspoken ways things are done will take precedence over all but the best-laid plans, and thus real strategic change often demands deep cultural transformation as a prerequisite

"Fair use"

Note: take the case of "fair use," which as we all know (at least in the US context) is not a legally defined status with respect to the use of copyrighted materials but rather a fuzzy defensive posture built of several highly subjective arguments. Fair use is a small and eternally at risk carve-out within a culture that is built on ownership, in other words. And as Susan Bielstein argues in Permissions: A Survival Guide, every time we ask permission to use an image or a quotation in a way that ought to fall under fair use, we weaken that carve-out, and we normalize the dominance of ownership, giving credence to corporate claims that we ought to be asking for permission at all times because that's the way things are done - the same, I want to argue, is true of publishing fees: every time we accept a corporate publisher's discount or fee waiver, or sign a "read and publish" deal, or otherwise use public funds to cover the increasingly ridiculous sums charged in order to circulate the products of research, we help strengthen the argument that it's perfectly normal for corporations to control the flow of knowledge and to profit from doing so

so what are our alternatives?
- we've heard about several of them over the course of the day today: projects and platforms and publishing workflows that are not corporate-owned, but that rely on public and institutional investment in order to make both publishing and reading freely available to all, and that are accountable to the publics that they serve
- there are lots more of these that we haven't talked about, including the Open Library of the Humanities, which is not only celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year but has published openly about its business model
I want to talk a bit today about my own project, Humanities Commons
- for the last ten years, I've been working with colleagues, first within the Modern Language Association, and now at Michigan State University, to develop a non-extractive, scholar-led, and academy-owned and governed alternative to commercial platforms, thus allowing for open, collective, equitable communication processes that give all scholars agency over the ways that work in their fields circulates
- HC is a bit different: we're not a publisher, or a journal system, but rather a platform that brings together a social/blogging network and a repository in ways designed to facilitate direct scholar-to-scholar communication
overview of HC functionality
HC community governance and support

thank you

Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu

Note: Thanks so much.

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