Common Struggles: Policy-Based Vs. Scholar-Led Approaches to Open Access in the Humanities

Common Struggles: Policy-based vs. scholar-led approaches to open access in the humanities Samuel A. Moore 2019 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the common Yet let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose ― Anonymous, 17th century protest song Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. ― Audre Lorde (1984) 2 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. OA is increasingly on the agenda for humanities researchers in the UK, having been mandated in various forms by universities and governmental funders strongly influenced by advocates in the STEM disciplines. Yet publishing practices in the humanities are unique to the field and any move to a new system of scholarly communication has the potential to conflict with the ways in which humanities research is published, many of which are shaped by the expectations of the neoliberal university that uniquely impact on the practices of humanities researchers. Furthermore, OA does not reflect a unified ideology, business model or political outlook, and different methods of publication based on open practices will inherently represent a variety of values, struggles or conceptual enclosures. This thesis assesses the contrasting values and practices of different approaches to OA in the humanities through a series of case-studies on governmental and scholar-led forms of OA, explored through a critical methodology comprising both constructivism and deconstruction. The thesis argues that the UK governmental policy framework, comprised of policies introduced by the Research Councils (RCUK) and Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCE), promotes a form of OA that intends to minimise disruption to the publishing industry. The scholar-led ecosystem of presses, in contrast, reflects a diversity of values and struggles that represent a counter-hegemonic alternative to the dominant cultures of OA and publishing more generally. The values of each approach are analysed on a spectrum between the logic of choice versus the logic of care (following the work of Annemarie Mol) to illustrate how the governmental policies promote a culture of OA predominantly focused on tangible outcomes, whereas the scholar-led presses prioritise an ethic of care for the cultures of how humanities research is produced and published. In prioritising a commitment to care, scholar-led presses display a praxis that resembles the kinds of activities and relationships centred on common resource 3 management (‘commoning’). The thesis concludes with a series of recommendations for how such care-full values could be best realised in an emancipatory commons- based ecosystem of OA publishing for the humanities, which would be cultivated through a range of institutions and political interventions. 4 Acknowledgements Thanks to Gary Hall and Sheila Anderson for supervising this research. Thank you to the research participants in Chapter 3 and the scholar-led presses analysed in Chapter 4 (and the rest of the Radical OA Collective). Many thanks to friends and colleagues – both online and offline – whose conversations were vital for developing my understanding of the topic, particularly to Janneke Adema, Martin Eve, and Cameron Neylon for their support, friendship and ongoing collaborations. Thank you also to staff at the British Library for their assistance and for putting up with my presence for the past few years. Thanks to Open Knowledge International for making this research possible through the award in 2013 of a Panton Fellowship covering tuition and travel assistance. Thanks also to my former colleagues at Ubiquity Press where I worked part-time while researching this thesis. Finally, thanks to the love and support from my friends and family. But most of all to Sierra Williams for being amazing every step of the way. Publication history An edited version of Chapter 2 was published in the Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication under the title ‘A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research’ (2017). http://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220 Sections from Chapter 6 were presented at the Radical Open Access 2 event at Coventry University in June 2018 under the title ‘The ‘Care-full’ Commons: Open Access and the Care of Commoning’. 5 Contents Preface 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. Publishing cultures in the humanities 33 Chapter 2. Exploring the histories of open access 62 Chapter 3. Governmental open access policies in the 83 UK: intentions and implementation Chapter 4. Scholar-led publishing: grassroots 111 alternatives to OA in the humanities Chapter 5. Choice and care: a critical comparison of 136 governmental and scholar-led approaches to OA Chapter 6. The care-full commons: on the radical 161 potential of commoning for OA in the humanities Conclusion. Recommendations and future research 190 Bibliography 212 6 Preface In 2009 I began working as an editorial assistant for the fledgling not-for- profit publisher the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS had pioneered a new publishing model for making research freely available to anyone with a stable internet connection, so-called open access publishing (OA). OA represented to me an exciting, ethical alternative to traditional subscription-based publishing, offering a range of possibilities to academic research dissemination, not just in the sciences but the humanities too. But as OA increased in popularity, I saw how it became co-opted by large, commercial publishers looking to profit from the success of this new approach to publishing. Simultaneously, as I began to think about OA from an academic perspective, I became interested in the work of DIY and grassroots humanities publishers at the margins, those who foreground a different set of values and practices to those of commercial publishing houses. During the course of this thesis I have continued to work part-time in open- access publishing, and my PhD was funded in part by the advocacy organisation Open Knowledge. I am therefore situated in a community dedicated to various forms of open culture and continue to view public access to scholarly knowledge as a broadly good thing, despite the many complications that arise from it. Over the course of my research I have witnessed the open access landscape change dramatically, including through the announcement and implementation of the governmental policies analysed here. My understanding as an advocate has developed as a result. But I have endeavoured, in the words of Donna Haraway, to ‘stay with the trouble’ of the complexity of OA, particularly with respect to my entanglement within it. Today the OA movement reflects a broad spectrum of positions and practices that impact on the humanities in both intended and unintended ways. OA is often said to embody the neoliberal ideals of efficiency, transparency and global competitiveness, while for others it continues to represent the progressive potential of social justice and emancipatory politics. The following thesis represents my attempt to make sense of this landscape looking specifically at the radical possibilities of OA in the humanities, something able to promote a diversity of 7 publishing practices in the service of critical interventions in publishing and higher education more generally. 8 Introduction Publishing is at the heart of everything humanities researchers do. Not only is it the way by which research is communicated to peers, colleagues and the broader public, it is also the single biggest determinant influencing the careers of researchers across all disciplines and career levels. The humanities have unique and deeply embedded publication cultures that are continually performed, reinforced and reified through shared repertoires that remain for the most part unquestioned by the academic community at large. Integral to this culture, up until recently, has been that publications are organised and released by presses who charge libraries and academics for access via subscriptions and associated fees. Academic publishing and the commodity form are thus inseparable. Yet over the past decade open access (OA) has increased in popularity across the globe, presenting a threat to toll-access publishing and many of the traditional publishing practices that accompany it. At a basic level, OA research removes price restrictions to academic research so that anyone with an internet connection may access it. But this is a simplification, and OA means many things to many different actors and can be achieved in a variety of ways. For example, it is prized for its ability to ‘democratise’ research access for socially just aims, to speed up the efficient progress of science, or to help provide slack for over-stretched library budgets, among other things. These different motivations are themselves reflective of a range of business models and ethico-political positions,

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