A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. The contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the Open Society Foundations, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Knowledge Unlatched, and Birkbeck, University of London.
Copyright law is the primary means by which society preserves and protects valued cultural heritage. There is a clear correlation between that which is protected and that which is valued by society for the continued enjoyment of future generations. However, this truth becomes troubling when it is considered that modern copyright continues to espouse antiquated ideals of acceptable cultural production, to the exclusion of the cultural property of many historically marginalized people groups. This article takes a critical look at copyright law to deconstruct the ways in which historical values and assumptions continue to color the modern protection of cultural creation, thereby confining cultural expression and barring protection to the cultural work of the marginalized.
Open scholarly communications are being suffocated by for-profit and large-scale academic publishers on the one hand and undermined by commercial academic social networks on the other. A possible part of the solution to both is ScholarlyHub, a new initiative to create a non-profit digital commons. ScholarlyHub proposes to serve as a social 'front end' of the open access movement and offer an aggregating space for diverse initiatives in the world of scholarly communications, from mentoring and pre-print services and data storage, to peer review and publication. This article explains the pressing need to 'clear the garden' in order to enable research to flourish in its natural environment and details the progress of ScholarlyHub to date, looking ahead with optimism to a more collaborative and open future. In ecobiology, an 'invasive plant species' is one that takes over a natural habitat and competes with native species for food, air, water and other resources. The invasive species grows so fast that native species are no longer able to survive. At some point, native plants die out, leaving the invasive species to thrive in a monopoly over its new habitat. Scholarly communications is one such habitat in which we as researchers have allowed an invasive species -the private, for-profit academic publishing industry -to take over the resources we need and use to create and disseminate knowledge. With a revenue stream of nearly US$10 billion (and growing), private, for-profit academic publishing is threatening to choke out all other, smaller forms of knowledge creation and dissemination, leaving companies like Elsevier, Springer Nature, SAGE and Wiley as the sole plants in the scholarly communication garden. At ScholarlyHub, we are determined not to see that happen and are working to clear the garden, a little space at a time, to allow for research to continue to grow and thrive in its natural environment: the world of non-profit, researcher-owned and -operated scholarly communication.
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