Thesis Draft Version

Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons By Stuart Lawson Draft PhD thesis, May 2018 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This excludes Fig 4.1, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. 1 Acknowledgements [full acknowledgements are still to be written, this is just to cover the legal basics] This research was supported by the Jisc Collections Studentship Award, which was awarded by Birkbeck, University of London and co-funded by the School of Arts at Birkbeck in conjunction with Jisc Collections. The text contains edited excerpts from the following prior publications: Lawson, Stuart. 2015. ‘The Politics of Open Access’, PhD proposal, Birkbeck, University of London <http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1494587> Lawson, Stuart. 2017. ‘Access, Ethics and Piracy’, Insights, 30(1): 25–30 <http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.333> Lawson, Stuart. Forthcoming [2019]. ‘Public Libraries and Knowledge Politics’, in Old Traditions and New Technologies: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Open Scholarly Communication, ed. by Martin Eve and Jonathan Gray (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Lawson, Stuart, Jonathan Gray, and Michele Mauri. 2016. ‘Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing’, Open Library of Humanities, 2(1) <http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.72> 2 Abstract . 3 Acronyms and Abbreviations AGORA – Access to Global Online Research on Agriculture AHRC – Arts and Humanities Research Council APC – Article Processing Charge BBSRC – Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BIS – Department for Business, Innovation and Skills BSD – Berkeley Software Distribution BOAI – Budapest Open Access Initiative CC BY – Creative Commons Attribution license CPR – Common-Pool Resources DfE – Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland) DNS – Domain Name System EPSRC – Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ESRC – Economic and Social Research Council F/OSS – Free and Open Source Software FLOSS – Free/Libre Open Source Software GPL – General Public License HEFCE – Higher Education Funding Council for England HEFCW – Higher Education Funding Council for Wales HINARI – Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative IAB – Internet Advisory Board IETF – Internet Engineering Task Force LEO – Longitudinal Education Outcome LIS – Library and Information Studies MRC – Medical Research Council NERC – Natural Environment Research Council NIH – National Institutes of Health (US) OA – Open Access OCSDnet – Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network OfS – Office for Students 4 OKFN – Open Knowledge Foundation OSI – Open Systems Interconnection PFI – Private Finance Initiative QR – Quality-Related Research RCUK – Research Councils UK RedALyc – Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal REF – Research Excellence Framework REG – Research Excellence Grant SciELO – Scientific Electronic Library Online SCWG – Scholarly Commons Working Group SFC – Scottish Funding Council STFC – Science and Technology Facilities Council TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol UCU – University and College Union UKRI – UK Research and Innovation UUK – Universities UK 5 Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Acronyms and Abbreviations Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Access to Knowledge: Academic Publishing Chapter 3. Access to Knowledge: Universities and Libraries Chapter 4. Understanding Openness Chapter 5. Neoliberalism, Liberty, and Openness Chapter 6. Neoliberal Higher Education Chapter 7. Open Access Policy in the UK Chapter 8. The Commons as an Alternative Policy Framework Chapter 9. Conclusion References 6 “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin 7 Chapter 1. Introduction Open access means making scholarly research freely available online for people to read with minimal restrictions on access and reuse (Eve 2014: 1; Suber 2012: 4).1 This simple definition masks a wealth of complexity, and open access is a concept that has had a notable impact on the way scholarly research is communicated and provoked a wide variety of responses from different stakeholders. In particular, the political aspects of open access, although often foregrounded in the popular perception of its intent, are under-theorized in the academic literature. This thesis is an attempt to address the political implications of open access and the implementation of open access policy. As will be made clear, open access has garnered support from both neoliberal ideologues and social justice activists (Eve 2017a: 55; Wickham and Vincent 2013: 6; see also Weller 2014: 156–59). So the focus of this thesis is on exploring the extent to which open access policy has been suffused with neoliberalism – how and why the ‘neoliberalisation’ of open access can be said to have occurred, explaining why this is important, and what steps may be taken as counter measures to work towards a non-neoliberal open access policy. This chapter will introduce the topic and summarise the overall thesis. It begins with a brief overview of open access, discussing its origins and purposes. Next follows an initial discussion of the politics surrounding open access, highlighting the complexity of this area of study and demonstrating the need for detailed research. Finally, an outline of the thesis explains the structure of this text and summarises its contents. What is open access? The term open access (OA) has been used in different contexts to describe the access situation regarding various resources, such as access to land (UK Government [n.d.]) or telecommunications infrastructure (Mair 2016; Newman 2016). As stated above, in this thesis – and throughout the literature on scholarly communication – open access refers to scholarly research. In general, the term is restricted to formal written scholarly texts such as academic books, journal articles, or theses. The related activities of making other educational and scholarly materials openly available may be called open education or open data. Chapter 4 will discuss the concept of openness and its various permutations at length. Before this, it is important to acknowledge the long history of scholarly research being shared both among communities of scholars and with wider publics.2 This is why Chapter 2 explores the role of publishing in this sharing of scholarly knowledge, giving further 1 The term ‘open access’ is used throughout this thesis without a hyphen, for instance journals are referred to as ‘open access journals’ rather than ‘open-access journals’. 2 When speaking of ‘public access’ to scholarship, there are many different publics for which open access could be beneficial. A non-exhaustive list of these publics includes medical charities, parliamentary researchers, small businesses, community organisations, lifelong students, citizen scientists, etc. 8 definitions and background history of scholarly publishing. Indeed, open access can be seen as a reaction against, and positioned in opposition to, traditional academic publishing. Open access, as a specific form of publishing and sharing scholarship, became possible with the advent of digital technologies. As such, elements of what was later to become known as open access can be traced back to the earliest days of the internet, as academics used the internet to share data and communicate via digital networks (for example by email) long before the web was created. The history of the internet is inseparable from its relationship to academia; the original Arpanet was created to share information between networked computers (Kelty 2008: 139) at a time when computers were so large and expensive that researchers at established research institutions such as universities made up a significant proportion of users (see Chapter 4 for more on this history). Over time, as internet- based technologies became more widely adopted, the traditional print publishing industry began to publish in digital formats as well. The term open access was originally defined in 2002 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which opened with the memorable phrase: ‘An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good’ (Chan et al. 2002). This statement highlights the role of technology as an enabler while simultaneously proclaiming the ethical and social nature of open access. The Budapest Declaration was followed by two further declarations – the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (Brown et al. 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003). These three declarations – referred to by Peter Suber as the ‘BBB definition’ (Suber 2012: 7) – helped to define open access as a ‘movement’3 and provide a common touchstone to conceptualise it. As of 2018, the two most well-established pathways to open access are journals and repositories. Open access journals are academic journals that do not have any price barrier to access them, so anyone with access to the internet can view them online. This pathway is referred to as ‘gold’ open access. There is no inherent difference between open access or subscription journals other than the fact that no payment is required from the reader, and the extra permissions for use that are granted by open licenses (see Chapter 4 for more on open licenses). Publishing open access still costs money

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