Chris Freeland: [00:00:00] For years, the open access movement has promised a more equitable world for scholarship. But as more of our publishing infrastructure is shaped or captured by commercial incentives, our harder question keeps surfacing. If knowledge is openly available, but controlled by the same market forces as before, has anything truly changed?
Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland and I'm the librarian at the Internet Archive. I wanna welcome you to today's book Talk. In his book, Publishing Beyond the Market, Samuel Moore challenges us to rethink open access from the ground up. Guiding our conversation today will be someone who knows quite a bit about scholarly publishing herself, Heather Joseph, the Executive director of Spark.
As we get started here today, I would like to welcome Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archives digital [00:01:00] librarian for a little context setting.
Brewster Kahle: Thank you for this, Sam and Heather. This is so important. I mean, we run a library that's becoming. More and more difficult. I mean, back in the old days, we would buy things like really buy things and then make it more available to people through lending, through interlibrary loan, through the Xerox machine that was implanted in every library.
All these things are become incredibly complicated now that we had these. Gatekeepers that are constricting access so that we have intermediaries that are asserting enormous levels of control, and our libraries are worse in many ways than they were when I was growing up. That was not the digital promise.
So please, Heather and Sam help us out here and provide the path.
Chris Freeland: Thanks, Brewster. Here to introduce our speakers and to set the stage for today's discussion is Dave Hanson, the Executive Director of Authors Alliance.
Dave Hansen: Thanks Chris. And thanks Brewster. gonna do [00:02:00] just some brief introductions.
Sam Moore is a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library. I had the pleasure. I I don't end up in Cambridge very often, but I had the pleasure of meeting Sam a couple years ago actually, when we did a in-person book talk at Cambridge. We collaborated on with Peter Baldwin, who actually gave a talk for this series on his book Athena Unbound.
So Sam is a affiliated lecturer at the Cambridge Digital Humanities and a college research associate at King's College Cambridge. And his research sits within the digital humanities and focuses on topics related to academic publishing, research practices in the humanities and social sciences. And issues relating to research communication.
So he holds a PhD in digital Humanities from King's College London, and he's also one of the organizers of the Radical Open Access Collective, which is a pretty cool thing you should check out. So Sam's gonna be talking about his book today in conversation with Heather Joseph. Heather is the executive [00:03:00] director of Spark.
Which has been one of the leading advocates in the United States on open access for the last 20 years. Heather has led Spark and had some really amazing wins on the policy front in terms of pushing policy and helping, not just policy happen, but helping the organizations that are necessary to support open access, kind of move along with that policy to see open access to scholarly publishing grow.
So one really shining example to me is that behind the scenes in many ways, I think Spark did a ton of the groundwork that led to the federal government implementing a policy just a few years ago that said that all federally funded research where the government's paying grant dollars out, that research has to be immediately available to the public for free once it is published.
Heather gets a lot of credit for seeing those kinds of policies be put in place. With that, I will hand it over to Sam and he's gonna do a intro to the book.
Sam: [00:04:00] Thank you very much, Dave. So what I'm gonna do is try to introduce some of the themes of the book, particularly academic publishing, how it's kind of a weird industry.
So academic publishing is a notoriously extractive industry. It's been that way for quite a number of years. It's a very sort of interesting industry in the sense that the labor and the content is provided by working academics who get their salaries by and large through kind of universities and those places.
But then commercial organizations sort of take that labor and they repackage it and they organize peer review. They do lots of helpful things, but essentially they manage to get a lot of their work for free. And so the open access movement, in many ways was sort of responding to what they saw as the increasing kind of commercial control.
Of the publishing industry of academic knowledge production, and so say in the nineties, this sort of manifested in what was called the serials crisis, where journal prices were increasing far beyond the rates of inflation. Now, academic libraries need to subscribe to as many journals as [00:05:00] they can because obviously you need as much coverage of the literature as possible.
You can't just have. Small amounts of it. And so they're essentially dealing in many monopolies. If you publish one article, then you can control that. So the open access movement in say, I think it was sort of the early two thousands, became this thing that was responding to to the economic conditions.
And they were looking at the new digital technologies and they were saying, actually, we can use digital technologies to make stuff freely available. It was a really kind of exciting time, an interesting time for these advocates, and they thought we can put these technologies to good use and we can do so just to give the literature to people, but they didn't necessarily frame that in purely kind of in terms to, that might make the economics of publishing better.
That was the end goal really for sort of how the open access movement was originally kind of defined. And so it turns out that. Kind of what happened there because they were focusing on open access to the literature and how to make that happen. Commercial publishers were essentially kind of still welcome in the camp, and so they extracted and continue to extract, [00:06:00] just like they did for subscription publishing.
They do so with open access as well, and they do that with regards primarily to article processing charges, which are individual payments that are paid to publishers to make the work open access. And those payments average are around sort of. $3,000 I think off the top of my head. And then alongside that, the old subscription model, which which still exists today and is still just as important to an extent while there's more open axis material.
Being published, those APCs have sort of turned into new forms of subscriptions as well via what's called transformative agreements, which kind of allow universities to pay in advance for publishing at the same time as access. So there's two things are really related. So the economics of it has meant that while in the subscription market.
Publishers were not necessarily incentivized to publish tons of papers. It was just more of a kind of sense of if you publish certain things, people will subscribe to them and, and that's how the economics work. But now with the open access movement, [00:07:00] one thing which has happened is this push for volume.
And commercial publishers are very much incentivized by these article processing charges. And so we see now no end of publications that shouldn't have been published because publishers are not really keeping track on. What they're publishing and they're letting things kind of slip. They're also very incentivized to, to automate a lot of this stuff and to remove humans from the process as much as possible.
And so all that's kind of bad and that's a sort of a very basic introduction to what's happened with academic publishing. And I'm sure that Heather and I will get through some of this throughout the conversation. So my book takes that as the starting point, that the open access kind of failed to live up to its promise.
We have lots more open access stuff now, which is fantastic and it's really good. I don't want to downplay that. However. It has meant that the same actors that commercially controlled publishing kind of before open access, still control it now. And so I took that as a starting point and I wanted to see what would it look like to have a more progressive approach to open access publishing and to academic publishing.
And I tried to do that through the lens [00:08:00] of the Commons or the digital commons. And so the digital commons is a term that actually all around the same time as open access was a thing that was coming up and it was really framed as sort of. We can make free access to stuff. We can give, like Wikipedia being kind of seen as a digital commons or creative commons being the same kind of thing.
We can license things and make it freely available, and my argument really is that those things, including open access and the commons in the digital sense did not really take. Production into account. It didn't really take how we actually produce this stuff into account. It was still very happy to say, actually commercial actors are kind of fine in this space.
They can still make money as long as the stuff is free. Now, to an extent, like you can see the logic there. They're responding to a particular moment where we have these new technologies and we want to make stuff freely available. And it's a liberal argument for kind of how this stuff works. But it turns out that if you allow commercial actors in that regard.
They just hoover it up. And that's particularly what's happened in that in academic publishing, they've just hoovered up the resources in a way that doesn't allow a kind of [00:09:00] a functioning market to exist. And so I explore the idea of the Commons as a kind of a counterpoint to that. And what I mean by the Commons is communities and collectives getting together.
To maintain and to share and to produce their resources. So it's about production. It's not about access to resources. And so if you look at open access in that light, it starts to be a thing which is community controlled. It's often about small communities. It's not big and maximalist and commercial. And so the logic of that looks a bit different.
It's about how we support one another. To publish in this kind of community way. And so that's kind of what the book does really. It says Open access publishing was kind of good. It was a good idea. It didn't really live up to its promise, which is not really the fault of the original kind of founders of open access.
And there are lots of different kind of open access movements as well. It wasn't just one, but also ultimately what happens is if you let commercial actors in, they were just sort of. Homogenize everything. Take it all and go. That's kind of what happened. So there are plenty more kind of arguments [00:10:00] within the book.
I think I'll leave it there and I'll introduce Heather now to have the conversation, but hopefully that kind of sets the scene to an extent.
Heather: Thanks for that brief introduction. And also I wanted to open by saying thank you for the book actually itself, because you managed to produce a book that's both thoughtful and thought provoking, but one that also really approaches a thorny issue by centering care and kindness.
And that's kind of a rare thing right now in this environment. So first and foremost, I really appreciate the approach. So. Thanks for the book. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah. I
Heather: wanna start the conversation by honing in on the concept of the market, right? And moving beyond the market, obviously is the title of your book.
You talked about some of the peculiarities, shall we say, of this market. It's not a particularly well-functioning market, and I wanna give maybe two data points to help the folks put this into context. You may think of the journal publishing market as something that's just of esoteric interest to a handful of academics.
It's huge business. The market that Sam is writing [00:11:00] about is roughly an $11 billion a year revenue producing industry, which is roughly the same size as the National Football League here in the us. So we're talking giant business. There's about five companies that control the majority of that market, and those companies have profit margins that are some of the largest going right, larger than Exxon, larger than Google, larger profit margins in Coca-Cola.
Anywhere from, you know, high twenties to upwards of 40% because of the free labor that Sam talked about, and it's something that we'll go back to. So just trying to put into context, the scope of the market issue that Sam, that you're trying to approach. Moving beyond the markets though, as your title it to me indicates we have to stop thinking about.
Sharing knowledge as a commodity, right. Or knowledge as a commodity in specific. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the notion of the commoditization of knowledge and your sense of the [00:12:00] importance of thinking beyond. The way knowledge has become commonly treated and moving more into treating it as a public good.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts in terms of how you could encourage people to sort of think in that direction.
Sam: Yeah, I think that's a good point. If you're reading the book, looking for a solution to that multi-billion dollar market, that you're not gonna find one, it's very difficult 'cause it's so massive and it's so difficult to kind of even conceive of sort of chipping away at.
And I think that, I mean there are obviously approaches, like open access policies have tried. We have grassroots approaches. But really the way to conceive of how to approach this big market is I think actually through smallness and through the act. The idea that's. We have communities that are maintaining these resources and it's the communities that are actually left behind in the kind of turn to sort of big academic publishing.
And so to an extent, the journal form is, is sort of commodified very much. And so the journal form is a kind of a [00:13:00] community of people. So let's take a community working from Elsevier to, to pick on them. And again, they're not paid by and large, the editor in chief might get paid, but by and large, they're not paid.
And what they're doing is generating kind of knowledge, and they're doing it in this kind of commons based way. Actually. They're doing it as a community. But then they're allowing themselves to have that sort of all extracted and taken off. And so all that value, I mean, you can talk about it in quite kind of basic marks in terms all that value is then extracted and sort of turned into profit and moving towards the idea of knowledge.
I mean, knowledge is a public good in the sense that it is. Much better to have access to knowledge than not, and giving people access. I don't want to downplay that. I don't think that the end goal of reforms to publishing should be making things open access. But open access should be a prerequisite, and it's a crucial element of giving access to people is just to.
But like people do not have access to things. I mean, in the UK right now, I'm in a very kind of wealthy institution. We can't afford everything by a long shot. Other institutions can't let alone people in kind of the global cells and [00:14:00] all those sorts of places. So actually rethinking about things as a public good is really helpful.
But then also rethinking about the ways in which they're produced. That's what I'm really, really interested in is that if we can sort of reorganize the ways that knowledge is, is produced in a slightly different way. Not giving all that free stuff to a commercial industry. That's where stuff gets exciting, I think.
But again, it's, it's never gonna be a thing where we just move from one system to another. 'cause the moment you do that, you're just rehearsing the logic of commercial publishing because they'll just take it. I
Heather: think it's a really important point because I think we often hear people talk about reforming the market, right?
They'll use system and market interchangeably, and if we think about sort of changing around the edges of the market or you know, just shifting one element in the market, we still end up with treating knowledge as a commodity rather than as a public good. And I think it makes it very difficult to think about moving to a more community centric, community focused model where you focus on everyone everywhere, being able to be empowered.
To both produce [00:15:00] access and also benefit from knowledge as a public good, which is I think where we want to go. I wanna talk a little bit about the fact that, I love that you quoted the Budapest Open Access Declaration in the opening of your book, the idea of knowledge as a public good, and you talked about sort of the motivations of the original open access movement, which the BOAI.
First of all, kind of beautifully written, Peter Suber is the main author, so you see a little bit of a lyrical nature in how he writes. But the BOAI says, an old tradition and a new technology of converged to make possible and unprecedented new public good, right? That old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the research and share it without the expectation of payment for the sake of inquiry.
Inquiry and knowledge. And the new technology, of course, was the internet. The idea was that the public good that they made possible is the ability, the worldwide electronic accessibility or distribution of peer-reviewed literature completely free and unrestricted. And [00:16:00] that mirrors, I think, the original conception of how scholars shared their work in sort of a circle of gifts.
Economy, if you will, operating on the principle of like generalized reciprocity. You exchange goods to build social connections in a sense of community, not to extract or track specific value. And I think my question as I was reading was, is it part of your ultimate vision, kind of an essentially a return to those roots or an updated version of those roots?
Sam: That's a really good question. I mean, I think I probably would answer that by going kind of before the BOAI, and so one piece of research I've did, and I have this is in the book as well, is identifying scholar led journals that existed on the very early web in the early nineties. And what they were doing is they also sought the power of digital technologies in that kind of lovely way that Peter writes about, and they did so as a way of sort of sharing their knowledge, but also actually doing it themselves.
This kind of like, we are scholar collectives and we want to do this stuff [00:17:00] ourselves. And public good is very important. But actually, so are things like experimentation and non commerciality sort of critical theory. So a lot of these journals of postmodern culture, which is, I think it might still exist today, it was a hugely important journal that existed.
And it was a very early scholar led, open access journal way before the open access movement was a thing. And they were publishing like Bell Hooks published in the first issue. So really kind of important. People were part of that. And again, that kind of comes back to sort of the smallness of it all in that.
They weren't really speaking the language of the open access movement. It was more of just a kind of a visionary thing of sort of proto open access, if you will. And then that kind of, I charted really that sort of how that logic continued throughout as digital technologies became more important.
There've always been scholar collectives who've been doing this kind of thing. And so that that idea of we can sort of do it ourselves as long as we're supported to do so, and we then make things freely available that still exists today. And then it is only obviously become more and more important through things like diamond open access, which for people who do not [00:18:00] know is, is a kind of a more ethical approach to open access where authors.
Do not pay either to access the material or to submit. And again, that has a real association with the community and with that kind of getting together and getting stuff done. So I think that what I'd like to do with the BOII, and actually they did update it and made it a lot more about the sort of issues that I interested in, which is really good.
'cause I think that they understood some of the things that went wrong is that I think. None of us could really have foreseen what would've happened with, I mean, open access, it was a good idea. There's no reason to assume that commercial publishers was gonna come in and just sort of take it all, but it ended up kind of the way it did, and now we have to do what we have to do to try and reign in some of those successes, I guess.
So I, I really locate it at the, the small community aspect as the thing which has been that common thread. And it exists before the web of course, as well, but it's always been there since the sort of the birth of the worldly small scholar journals that then carried on from there.
Heather: You talk in the book a lot about community as a source of.
Good governance and ultimately really control of your own destiny, control of intellectual [00:19:00] outputs and interaction with knowledge. Not a one ring to rule them all top-down approach, but really an approach driven up from locality and centered on community priorities. And you know, I think that's kind of the ideal behind the diamond open access model that you talked about, at least as it's been deployed in Latin America.
Local control, local priorities, lifting local voices. I would note that people often talk about. Supporting community and centering community, but it's hard to know what it actually takes to step back and break long standing habits and practices of that top down control and approach. How would you advise people to approach changing, not just their thinking about intentionally and actively centering community, but also actions?
Sam: Yeah. Firstly, I, I want to say that I try really hard not to sort of reify. Or Defi community too much. I don't think that like community can be a really bad thing as well. It can be a source of antagonism. It can be a source [00:20:00] of conflict. There are people who are excluded for bad reasons and such, and so I don't want to say that community is the thing that will fix it, but what I want to point to, I guess, is that community.
It's already the way that knowledge is produced, even if, if you have small groups of people working for a commercial publisher, that's still a community led kind of effort. So what the book kind of pushes people to do, I guess, is to think about things around like governance, like you said. So how you can design not just the rules and the kind of conflict record reconciliation methods, which is sort of really important in the common space, but also how you create a sort of normative atmosphere for getting on with one another.
And so actually a, a lot of that does start with. Thinking about your actual, your own relationships with sort of knowledge production, the actors you work with, and it sort of forces you to think about your sort of position within that. Now that's not particularly grounded in anything. It's quite theoretical, but it's still, that's why I talk quite a lot about the idea of care, because.
Care is another one of those notions which forces us to think about [00:21:00] kind of the relations that we have with the various things. And it could be care for the publishing product or it could be care for the, the labor as part of it all, or just sort of care for oneself as well, which none of those things are really present in what you would call more cookie cutter approaches to publishing, where they, they take the article.
They just sort of spit it out and they funnel it through a system. And again, fewer and fewer humans are being involved in that process. So if you start, as I do from the premise that publishing is a community led thing, it has to inextricably a human led thing as well. So you have to take ownership of those kind of relationships, which none of that's can practical.
I, I think your question was kind of alluding more to the sort of the, the practical side of things, and so. The idea is if you are already giving a lot of work to the commercial actors that I don't think are particularly good, you can redirect some of that work. You don't have to do all of it. We all, some of us have to publish for various reasons.
Some of us have to play the game. That's understandable. But actually you don't. It's not a zero sum [00:22:00] game. You can support. The small presses, the library presses, the, the university presses the people who are doing really, really good stuff. And that, to me is a good idea. 'cause, and that comes back to commons and, and kind of commenting.
That's what commenting is really. It's trying to sort of nurture the world you want with regard in this respect with regard to academic publishing.
Heather: I think it's so important that you go back to time and time again, the notion of the commons as a place where knowledge just isn't freely shared, just for people to access, but also as the locus of its production, which can facilitate that care approach, you know, much more effectively than the, I mean.
Just by their sheer size. I often think of sort of the nameless, faceless, commercialized ventures, for publishing, which I think is really, really important. you mentioned, again, you know, the idea, not just the idea, but the reality that we live in. Where the massive amount of largely invisible and you know, largely uncompensated labor that the current academic publishing and scholar communication [00:23:00] system and markets really rely on.
Could you maybe talk a little bit about one or two of the models or examples that you talked about in the book that have actually deployed strategies to address this head on?
Sam: Yeah, so. There are a number of, of different kind of experiments at the moment now, which do try to sort of like take that sort of labor issue head on.
I'm thinking one which, which sort of off the top of my head would be in the last three or four years, there've been an increasing number of journal editorial, board resignations, where they've said. We don't like the conditions that this publisher is giving us. And some of that might be that the publisher is knocking on the door and saying, you guys need to publish more articles.
You're currently not economically viable for us. You need to double, triple your output, et cetera. And so they said, actually, we, we don't wanna do that. We want to kind of land together. And so it's a collective action in the sense that they say, if you don't change your conditions, we will leave. And oftentimes yeah, they, they have to just leave.
And so you've, you've seen a number of journals that have done this now. [00:24:00] Again, if you were to look at, no, I think this is great. I think more and more people should do this, and I think that oftentimes what ends up happening is they go into not-for-profit publishers or they go to university presses, or they just strike out on their own and do their own publishing, which I think is fantastic.
That's a really great idea. Again, it's not really the thing which like I don't expect the. Academic kind of world to suddenly resign on mass from editorial boards. I love that, but it's not gonna happen. But it's the visibility of these things, which I think is really important. But it's one tactic that sheds light on the sort of extractive labor practices and also the fact that we collectively.
Actually, if we do get together, we can decide a lot of these conditions. And it might not be that we, we have to leave. It might not be as, you don't have to leave the publisher necessarily. You can demand better conditions, and that could be around allowing researchers to publish their work without embargo in a repository, those sorts of things or anything like that, really.
So it's just recognizing that actually we do have quite a lot of power. We don't have huge amount of power as individuals, but [00:25:00] collectively, if we can kind of orchestrate and, and organize. That's where the kind of the good stuff, the fun stuff really takes off. And so in any sort of intervention in, in the publishing industry, I think has to have that kind of collective element to it.
And it could be sort of the top down level. It could be kind of at the grassroots starting Euro project level. It's really, it's about sort of nurturing that collectivity. So I think that that's kind of one kind of idea which. jumps to mind. Yeah.
Heather: And I do wanna just be careful to say that, you know, as we're talking about publishers, not all publishers in the space are bad, right?
Like we have the very large behemoth commercial publishers, but then we also have publishers like the University of Michigan Press, which published your book, you know, and you've definitely alluded to and mentioned by name, a few of the players who are actually contributing positively to this evolution.
So I just, I just wanted to. Take a moment just to say we're not tarring everyone with the same, the same brush of this conversation.
Sam: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I didn't really introduce the sort of the market dynamics of publishing in a way that like, essentially at [00:26:00] my university, sort of five, five publishers publish around 50% of everything.
Then there's a 50% that's a long tail and there's a lot more kind of what you might call biblio diversity or a lot more kind of diversity in that kind of publishing market. Now I think that the, the problem with structuring publishing as a commercial market in the way that it is, is it forces even the good people to, to play that game.
And that's the main problem really. It doesn't allow them to do the stuff that we want 'em to do and to actually act ethically, it just forces them to be commercial and increasingly commercial and obviously. Left, right and center. Things are being defunded. There's less money for everything, and so that makes the forced to make the difficult and kind of bad decisions.
But you are a hundred percent right.
Heather: I, I have kind of a, a larger question for you. as somebody who's been in the open access movement since the inception, I read your book with a sense of. The familiarity of some of the questions that you called. And you know, one of the things that you note is that you really talk about open access and the OA movement as a starting point to raise larger questions about [00:27:00] how to get to something different, not the end and of itself.
And you know, something closer. To a wider spread adoption of a commons of care model. And I think what you've done is, is pretty frankly call the question of the continued relevancy of open access as a model and open access as a movement. And all movements have moments when their utility peaks and then it either dissipates or they evolve.
I'm curious what you see happening with the OA movement. Do you see a continued utility of open and open access as a tool or fill in the blank?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, I think the. From my perspective, the good thing about open access is just how sort of pluralistic it was. As much as we've been talking about it as sort of driven around open access and with this end goal, there's actually lots and lots of different approaches to that as sort of funders have become more interested in it or governments have become more interested in it.
That means that. There's been sort of resources available for people like me. I mean, I've, I've been able to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn't [00:28:00] have done because of the open access movement. So I think it's that sort of gathering of resources that you can take for interesting ends. That has been really, really helpful.
Now, I think probably you're right that the open access movement as a movement proper. Possibly less on the agenda of different organizations. Now, that doesn't mean it won't go back up the agenda, but obviously the mere idea of openness is under question because of sort of geopolitical tensions or all those sorts of things.
That means I think we have to sort of fight for the idea of openness to an extent. But also it might be okay if we take ideas of the commons and we run with them and we say, actually this is the kind of thing that we want that will give us open access. But actually if we emphasize the needs to.
Recolonize publishing, then things start to look a little bit different. And my feeling is that with the sort of the push towards ethical approaches to open access and sort of diamond open access, there probably is a space for that. And actually policy makers in particular are interested in those spaces.
So that's where the open access movement becomes, its possibly slightly more antagonistic towards commercial publishers. 'cause traditionally it [00:29:00] wasn't actually where it allowed them in, but we just emphasize something different. We say, actually we just don't want. To be driven by commercial imperatives and we can have an open access that's different to that.
So I don't really know what will happen. I mean, in some respects, open access has won the data, hasn't it? Because I mean, there's no end of stuff that's being published. Open access, there's, it's on an upward trajectory. I think more stuff is published open access than closed now in the journal space.
So if it goes in that direction, then. Maybe that's the argument made for me, but it's much like I would do so not just in publishing, but sort of outside of publishing, like worried about the marketization of the university. I'm worried about the marketization of just about everything in the world, and so joining up with the kind of people who are building alternatives outside of those spaces as well is something that I think is really, really important.
And that's a much bigger sort of political question.
Heather: Yeah. I think the last question that I had had on my list, and I'll, maybe I'll just kind of mung it in here because you got right to it is in your, the conclusion of the book, you go right. At the recognition that in order for any reform [00:30:00] in the scholarly, you know, communications or market to, to system, or market to succeed, structural and culture change has to happen at higher education institutions, right?
We have to change what it means to reward the best work, both in terms of encouraging. A much broader diversity of outputs to be valued, but also to encourage a much more diverse set of actors and people and roles, right, to be valued. Kind of ending the first author of an article or bust dynamic that we have now, and you posit that at least part of making this happen is pushing to make higher ed institutions less hierarchical.
Better able to support teams, collaboration. Right. Kind of the essence of those smaller communities moving away from individuals, but into communities. And I'm wondering if you could maybe wrap up my direct questions by talking a little bit about what you see as even any promising starting points for catalyzing that kind of structural change.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, I do think a lot of this does come down to [00:31:00] university governance and the needs to increase governance. Just to academics, just like academic publishing. Universities have been marketized and they are now governed by market logic in the same way. I, I dunno how to get there necessarily. We have unions, we have kind of people who are working in this space.
It's a continuous kind of struggle, but I don't think it requires, I mean, it requires an argument for giving more money to universities as well, and then also redistributing it within the institutions in a way that is, is more democratic a sort of, maybe like a slightly different way of thinking about is that.
Within the university, we also have this kind of idea of, of open research, so not just open access, these kind of broader practices that underpin the research process, data sharing, open peer review, open source software, all those sorts of things. And actually. My feeling is if you make that about kind of governance and you make that about kind of changing the university, then the conversation starts to become quite interesting because you are encouraging people to experiment with how they practice knowledge production.
It's not just [00:32:00] about how they share stuff at the end of it, it's how they actually. Engage in different forms of kind of sharing their work or presenting their work or doing all those sorts of things. And in doing so, you get them just kind of interested in something different. And so moving away from what you might call those kind of, those sort of rarey practices that we all do.
Like, I mean, the reason I published the book was because my advisor told me if I wanted an academic job, I had to publish a book. Now I'm very happy I did publish that book, but actually it would've been nice to have the opportunity to do something kind of radically different and to not have to worry about those sorts of things.
And so. We think about it from a sort of practice level, then I think it starts, yeah, it starts to become a bit of a different conversation beyond the focus on like universities requiring things to be open access and actually universities encouraging people to engage openly with themselves and their processes.
And I think that the reason that's really important is that in the UK in particularly. Libraries have been sort of transformed almost into these sort of compliance bodies where a lot of what they do is, yeah, they have to [00:33:00] check that people are publishing open access and making sure that stuff is in a repository, and we have a lot of money to do that.
Now, a lot of that money or those resources and those stuff could be spent. Encouraging those open practices and getting people on board with it in that kind of way. So I think that's one way I could see the open movement actually ticking off in a different direction, is if you focus on practice and you focus on enabling different kinds of practices.
Rewarding, like you say, rewarding and crediting all these different things that are going on, not just the individual research article, but the technicians that support it at the library staff and all those sorts of things.
Dave Hansen: When I read your book, I kind of think of well counterpoints or examples of things that like maybe have been successful but have scaled in some way and haven't some, at least to date, been gobbled up by Elsevier.
And so the two examples were loss and archive and whether you know, particularly with your experience with them, 'cause you have some direct experience, like any lessons plus or minus from what they have done.
Sam: So the reason I'm interested in open access is 'cause my first job. [00:34:00] After being a struggling musician in my kind of early twenties was at plus.
And so I, I was sort of part of the journal plus one, and it was exactly around the time when plus one had developed this model, as I'm sure many of us know about. But they were no longer interested in publishing things based on how interesting those findings are, but as long as they'd been done correctly.
And so they invented what's called the kind of concept of the mega journal where they would receive APCs and they'd publish it. It would be peer reviewed, but it would no longer be published for novelty value. And so. They were the ones really who created a lot of those issues around kind of APCs and that drive for scale Now.
In biomedical publishing, they were always kind of used to paying to publish. It was a thing which they had already done. You'd give publishers money for color figures and those sorts of things. So it was a sort of an extension of the ways in which they'd already published and then nature turned up and they're like, actually, if we wanna copy this, this is great.
Like you guys are paying, like they gave you $2,000 an article, however much it was, and then kind of bad things kind of issue. But I think that what Plus did was they actually. Some of the smaller things [00:35:00] they did, they had like these things called community journals. So I know coming back to the idea of community, they had this called Plus Genetics, plus computational biology.
These are all really cool community led journals. And that model I think is something that I wish had been the kind of the dominant one that had kind of stuck. But again, it's not. It's too expensive to fund humans to do stuff. Again, you need it. It's big and scalable stuff. The archive is definitely a a, a better example, and I love the archives so much.
I think it's just like the coolest thing and it's sustained by kind of these weird mechanisms over the past however many years. And that, the good thing about that is it again, it tapped into like plastered, it tapped in to how high energy physicists already shared their work. They were already a kind of.
A Preprinting community in as early as the fifties and the sixties. Once you commit, you've finished your experiment. You just sent out your paper in the post to your collaborators and when the kind of, when email came and FTP servers and, and the web, that allowed them to sort of slightly open that list up or [00:36:00] in some respects, democratize that so that you, you didn't have to be on an exclusive club or an exclusive list to get access to those papers.
All these things have to. To some extent fit with the traditions of how people work, but at the same time do so in a way that nudges them in a kind of good direction. That's really what I think, and so I, I hope I didn't come across as too negative about plus, but I also think that, like I had, I guess I had my, my part in, in that.
In the, kind of the, the publishing system at that point and how it turned out. But, but I didn't work for Elsevier though, Heather.
Heather: Hey, it was 11 months. I didn't make the full contract, but it went to Elsevier actually from the American Astronomical Society where, because I'm much, much older than uem, I actually worked on converting their journals from print to electronic.
And so we were working on translating the journals into the, you know, the. Brand new internet environment while Paul Ginsberg was creating archive. And we had tons of conversations and we actually, we published the conversation between [00:37:00] us as publishers of journals and Paul as the creator of the archive in physics today about the fact that scientists used articles, they used those two outlets in different ways.
They used. Paul's outlet, you know, archive to communicate and they use the journals to convert prestige, right? For it was crystal clear in 1993, right? What the bifurcation was that needed to be addressed. So that'll tell you where we are still in having that same competition.
Dave Hansen: I have to ask this one because it possibly wins the award for most cynical question.
The question is, what are some cool ways that commercial publishers might integrate the idea of care and pervert its intentions and weaponize it for profit?
Sam: I mean, they're already doing that, aren't they? Yeah, they are already t taking all of that care and turning it into a logic of choice and,extraction.
I mean, yeah. I dunno. Heather, do you have any.
Heather: It's the right question to ask. I think it's just to be aware that with every strategy, there's a countervailing. I mean, [00:38:00] if it was not an $11 billion a year revenue market, you wouldn't have the vehement or the assurance of pushback, which you have, which no matter action you take, you have to be ready for.
There's gonna be an element of massive pushback, but being prepared is
Sam: all we can
Heather: do.
Sam: But yeah, I do think, like, so one, one theorist I, I talk about in the book is Anne-Marie Mo, who talks about care in opposition to choice. And she talks about it in, in actually in the sense of kind of medical care and how care itself is something that's kind of.
Individually situated, and it requires people to actually learn about the person and all those sorts of things. Whereas choice is more of a kind of something you enter into and you just, you personally are responsible for your own kind of medical needs. You choose whatever the kind of, um, device you need or whatever the kind of treatment is.
And the point that she makes is that care just does not fit market logic. It just, it, they just don't work together because the moment you introduce people having different needs. The market doesn't know what to do with [00:39:00] that very well. It's, it's, it wants to give you all the same stuff or the smallest amount of work possible to give you whatever it is you need.
so I think that they are kind of oppositional, even though they're being extracted at the same time.
Dave Hansen: One more here. How do you navigate balancing your perspective in the book, as you described with your role at Cambridge? You know, for example, thinking about read and publishing agreements that might come across your desk.
What role do you have in achieving or promoting those agreements and, you know, just answering author questions related to them?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly difficult because, like I said, 50% of our research output is with, with these five big commercial publishers now. I think I can say in the past that the library has tried to recommend canceling, but the University of Cambridge is a researcher governed institution, and uh, in some instances they have just said, actually, no, this is too important to us.
If we can afford it, you get us the best deal. And that's really what we can do. That's not always [00:40:00] the case. In some universities it can, there is more centralization and you can kind of override those sort of concerns. But at bottom. That many researchers are deciding they want to publish in that way. It would be very, very difficult for the University of Cambridge to cancel those sorts of things.
even when we say what we should, we think we should do the thing about open access in the UK is that it's been this kind of mixed bag of freeing up lots of resources for article processing charges for the bad stuff. But at the same time, the government were quite shrewd and they said, you know what?
You can use this stuff. In any way that supports our policies. And so at the same time you have a host of new university presses that have launched in the uk. So we have a real resurgent university press ecosystem that's subsidized by its host institutions. So thinking about that kind of 1960s US, the kind of golden era of the subsidized university press, it's nothing like that, but it's in the direction of a subsidized breath.
They don't have to publish for purely commercial reasons, and that really is because of the open access [00:41:00] agenda. So trying to find spaces. To divert that money because some of it does exist, is really what I do try to do. But at the end of the day it becomes more of a research culture issue where it's like if, if you guys are gonna continue doing this, like we have to keep supporting that.
We need you to change and we do try to get you to change, but like there's only so much you can do.
Dave Hansen: I just wanna thank Sam and Heather for a really great talk, super interesting issue and your approach to it in the book.
Sam: Thank you. I appreciate that. And thanks. Thanks very much for the conversation, Heather.
Chris Freeland: Thank you both for your time today. I wanna make sure that everyone has grabbed your copy of Publishing Beyond the Market. Again, you can read an open access edition online, download the PDF or the EPUB, or purchase it in print. Thanks all. Have a great day.
Thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow.
Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland and I'm the librarian at the Internet Archive. I wanna welcome you to today's book Talk. In his book, Publishing Beyond the Market, Samuel Moore challenges us to rethink open access from the ground up. Guiding our conversation today will be someone who knows quite a bit about scholarly publishing herself, Heather Joseph, the Executive director of Spark.
As we get started here today, I would like to welcome Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archives digital [00:01:00] librarian for a little context setting.
Brewster Kahle: Thank you for this, Sam and Heather. This is so important. I mean, we run a library that's becoming. More and more difficult. I mean, back in the old days, we would buy things like really buy things and then make it more available to people through lending, through interlibrary loan, through the Xerox machine that was implanted in every library.
All these things are become incredibly complicated now that we had these. Gatekeepers that are constricting access so that we have intermediaries that are asserting enormous levels of control, and our libraries are worse in many ways than they were when I was growing up. That was not the digital promise.
So please, Heather and Sam help us out here and provide the path.
Chris Freeland: Thanks, Brewster. Here to introduce our speakers and to set the stage for today's discussion is Dave Hanson, the Executive Director of Authors Alliance.
Dave Hansen: Thanks Chris. And thanks Brewster. gonna do [00:02:00] just some brief introductions.
Sam Moore is a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library. I had the pleasure. I I don't end up in Cambridge very often, but I had the pleasure of meeting Sam a couple years ago actually, when we did a in-person book talk at Cambridge. We collaborated on with Peter Baldwin, who actually gave a talk for this series on his book Athena Unbound.
So Sam is a affiliated lecturer at the Cambridge Digital Humanities and a college research associate at King's College Cambridge. And his research sits within the digital humanities and focuses on topics related to academic publishing, research practices in the humanities and social sciences. And issues relating to research communication.
So he holds a PhD in digital Humanities from King's College London, and he's also one of the organizers of the Radical Open Access Collective, which is a pretty cool thing you should check out. So Sam's gonna be talking about his book today in conversation with Heather Joseph. Heather is the executive [00:03:00] director of Spark.
Which has been one of the leading advocates in the United States on open access for the last 20 years. Heather has led Spark and had some really amazing wins on the policy front in terms of pushing policy and helping, not just policy happen, but helping the organizations that are necessary to support open access, kind of move along with that policy to see open access to scholarly publishing grow.
So one really shining example to me is that behind the scenes in many ways, I think Spark did a ton of the groundwork that led to the federal government implementing a policy just a few years ago that said that all federally funded research where the government's paying grant dollars out, that research has to be immediately available to the public for free once it is published.
Heather gets a lot of credit for seeing those kinds of policies be put in place. With that, I will hand it over to Sam and he's gonna do a intro to the book.
Sam: [00:04:00] Thank you very much, Dave. So what I'm gonna do is try to introduce some of the themes of the book, particularly academic publishing, how it's kind of a weird industry.
So academic publishing is a notoriously extractive industry. It's been that way for quite a number of years. It's a very sort of interesting industry in the sense that the labor and the content is provided by working academics who get their salaries by and large through kind of universities and those places.
But then commercial organizations sort of take that labor and they repackage it and they organize peer review. They do lots of helpful things, but essentially they manage to get a lot of their work for free. And so the open access movement, in many ways was sort of responding to what they saw as the increasing kind of commercial control.
Of the publishing industry of academic knowledge production, and so say in the nineties, this sort of manifested in what was called the serials crisis, where journal prices were increasing far beyond the rates of inflation. Now, academic libraries need to subscribe to as many journals as [00:05:00] they can because obviously you need as much coverage of the literature as possible.
You can't just have. Small amounts of it. And so they're essentially dealing in many monopolies. If you publish one article, then you can control that. So the open access movement in say, I think it was sort of the early two thousands, became this thing that was responding to to the economic conditions.
And they were looking at the new digital technologies and they were saying, actually, we can use digital technologies to make stuff freely available. It was a really kind of exciting time, an interesting time for these advocates, and they thought we can put these technologies to good use and we can do so just to give the literature to people, but they didn't necessarily frame that in purely kind of in terms to, that might make the economics of publishing better.
That was the end goal really for sort of how the open access movement was originally kind of defined. And so it turns out that. Kind of what happened there because they were focusing on open access to the literature and how to make that happen. Commercial publishers were essentially kind of still welcome in the camp, and so they extracted and continue to extract, [00:06:00] just like they did for subscription publishing.
They do so with open access as well, and they do that with regards primarily to article processing charges, which are individual payments that are paid to publishers to make the work open access. And those payments average are around sort of. $3,000 I think off the top of my head. And then alongside that, the old subscription model, which which still exists today and is still just as important to an extent while there's more open axis material.
Being published, those APCs have sort of turned into new forms of subscriptions as well via what's called transformative agreements, which kind of allow universities to pay in advance for publishing at the same time as access. So there's two things are really related. So the economics of it has meant that while in the subscription market.
Publishers were not necessarily incentivized to publish tons of papers. It was just more of a kind of sense of if you publish certain things, people will subscribe to them and, and that's how the economics work. But now with the open access movement, [00:07:00] one thing which has happened is this push for volume.
And commercial publishers are very much incentivized by these article processing charges. And so we see now no end of publications that shouldn't have been published because publishers are not really keeping track on. What they're publishing and they're letting things kind of slip. They're also very incentivized to, to automate a lot of this stuff and to remove humans from the process as much as possible.
And so all that's kind of bad and that's a sort of a very basic introduction to what's happened with academic publishing. And I'm sure that Heather and I will get through some of this throughout the conversation. So my book takes that as the starting point, that the open access kind of failed to live up to its promise.
We have lots more open access stuff now, which is fantastic and it's really good. I don't want to downplay that. However. It has meant that the same actors that commercially controlled publishing kind of before open access, still control it now. And so I took that as a starting point and I wanted to see what would it look like to have a more progressive approach to open access publishing and to academic publishing.
And I tried to do that through the lens [00:08:00] of the Commons or the digital commons. And so the digital commons is a term that actually all around the same time as open access was a thing that was coming up and it was really framed as sort of. We can make free access to stuff. We can give, like Wikipedia being kind of seen as a digital commons or creative commons being the same kind of thing.
We can license things and make it freely available, and my argument really is that those things, including open access and the commons in the digital sense did not really take. Production into account. It didn't really take how we actually produce this stuff into account. It was still very happy to say, actually commercial actors are kind of fine in this space.
They can still make money as long as the stuff is free. Now, to an extent, like you can see the logic there. They're responding to a particular moment where we have these new technologies and we want to make stuff freely available. And it's a liberal argument for kind of how this stuff works. But it turns out that if you allow commercial actors in that regard.
They just hoover it up. And that's particularly what's happened in that in academic publishing, they've just hoovered up the resources in a way that doesn't allow a kind of [00:09:00] a functioning market to exist. And so I explore the idea of the Commons as a kind of a counterpoint to that. And what I mean by the Commons is communities and collectives getting together.
To maintain and to share and to produce their resources. So it's about production. It's not about access to resources. And so if you look at open access in that light, it starts to be a thing which is community controlled. It's often about small communities. It's not big and maximalist and commercial. And so the logic of that looks a bit different.
It's about how we support one another. To publish in this kind of community way. And so that's kind of what the book does really. It says Open access publishing was kind of good. It was a good idea. It didn't really live up to its promise, which is not really the fault of the original kind of founders of open access.
And there are lots of different kind of open access movements as well. It wasn't just one, but also ultimately what happens is if you let commercial actors in, they were just sort of. Homogenize everything. Take it all and go. That's kind of what happened. So there are plenty more kind of arguments [00:10:00] within the book.
I think I'll leave it there and I'll introduce Heather now to have the conversation, but hopefully that kind of sets the scene to an extent.
Heather: Thanks for that brief introduction. And also I wanted to open by saying thank you for the book actually itself, because you managed to produce a book that's both thoughtful and thought provoking, but one that also really approaches a thorny issue by centering care and kindness.
And that's kind of a rare thing right now in this environment. So first and foremost, I really appreciate the approach. So. Thanks for the book. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah. I
Heather: wanna start the conversation by honing in on the concept of the market, right? And moving beyond the market, obviously is the title of your book.
You talked about some of the peculiarities, shall we say, of this market. It's not a particularly well-functioning market, and I wanna give maybe two data points to help the folks put this into context. You may think of the journal publishing market as something that's just of esoteric interest to a handful of academics.
It's huge business. The market that Sam is writing [00:11:00] about is roughly an $11 billion a year revenue producing industry, which is roughly the same size as the National Football League here in the us. So we're talking giant business. There's about five companies that control the majority of that market, and those companies have profit margins that are some of the largest going right, larger than Exxon, larger than Google, larger profit margins in Coca-Cola.
Anywhere from, you know, high twenties to upwards of 40% because of the free labor that Sam talked about, and it's something that we'll go back to. So just trying to put into context, the scope of the market issue that Sam, that you're trying to approach. Moving beyond the markets though, as your title it to me indicates we have to stop thinking about.
Sharing knowledge as a commodity, right. Or knowledge as a commodity in specific. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the notion of the commoditization of knowledge and your sense of the [00:12:00] importance of thinking beyond. The way knowledge has become commonly treated and moving more into treating it as a public good.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts in terms of how you could encourage people to sort of think in that direction.
Sam: Yeah, I think that's a good point. If you're reading the book, looking for a solution to that multi-billion dollar market, that you're not gonna find one, it's very difficult 'cause it's so massive and it's so difficult to kind of even conceive of sort of chipping away at.
And I think that, I mean there are obviously approaches, like open access policies have tried. We have grassroots approaches. But really the way to conceive of how to approach this big market is I think actually through smallness and through the act. The idea that's. We have communities that are maintaining these resources and it's the communities that are actually left behind in the kind of turn to sort of big academic publishing.
And so to an extent, the journal form is, is sort of commodified very much. And so the journal form is a kind of a [00:13:00] community of people. So let's take a community working from Elsevier to, to pick on them. And again, they're not paid by and large, the editor in chief might get paid, but by and large, they're not paid.
And what they're doing is generating kind of knowledge, and they're doing it in this kind of commons based way. Actually. They're doing it as a community. But then they're allowing themselves to have that sort of all extracted and taken off. And so all that value, I mean, you can talk about it in quite kind of basic marks in terms all that value is then extracted and sort of turned into profit and moving towards the idea of knowledge.
I mean, knowledge is a public good in the sense that it is. Much better to have access to knowledge than not, and giving people access. I don't want to downplay that. I don't think that the end goal of reforms to publishing should be making things open access. But open access should be a prerequisite, and it's a crucial element of giving access to people is just to.
But like people do not have access to things. I mean, in the UK right now, I'm in a very kind of wealthy institution. We can't afford everything by a long shot. Other institutions can't let alone people in kind of the global cells and [00:14:00] all those sorts of places. So actually rethinking about things as a public good is really helpful.
But then also rethinking about the ways in which they're produced. That's what I'm really, really interested in is that if we can sort of reorganize the ways that knowledge is, is produced in a slightly different way. Not giving all that free stuff to a commercial industry. That's where stuff gets exciting, I think.
But again, it's, it's never gonna be a thing where we just move from one system to another. 'cause the moment you do that, you're just rehearsing the logic of commercial publishing because they'll just take it. I
Heather: think it's a really important point because I think we often hear people talk about reforming the market, right?
They'll use system and market interchangeably, and if we think about sort of changing around the edges of the market or you know, just shifting one element in the market, we still end up with treating knowledge as a commodity rather than as a public good. And I think it makes it very difficult to think about moving to a more community centric, community focused model where you focus on everyone everywhere, being able to be empowered.
To both produce [00:15:00] access and also benefit from knowledge as a public good, which is I think where we want to go. I wanna talk a little bit about the fact that, I love that you quoted the Budapest Open Access Declaration in the opening of your book, the idea of knowledge as a public good, and you talked about sort of the motivations of the original open access movement, which the BOAI.
First of all, kind of beautifully written, Peter Suber is the main author, so you see a little bit of a lyrical nature in how he writes. But the BOAI says, an old tradition and a new technology of converged to make possible and unprecedented new public good, right? That old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the research and share it without the expectation of payment for the sake of inquiry.
Inquiry and knowledge. And the new technology, of course, was the internet. The idea was that the public good that they made possible is the ability, the worldwide electronic accessibility or distribution of peer-reviewed literature completely free and unrestricted. And [00:16:00] that mirrors, I think, the original conception of how scholars shared their work in sort of a circle of gifts.
Economy, if you will, operating on the principle of like generalized reciprocity. You exchange goods to build social connections in a sense of community, not to extract or track specific value. And I think my question as I was reading was, is it part of your ultimate vision, kind of an essentially a return to those roots or an updated version of those roots?
Sam: That's a really good question. I mean, I think I probably would answer that by going kind of before the BOAI, and so one piece of research I've did, and I have this is in the book as well, is identifying scholar led journals that existed on the very early web in the early nineties. And what they were doing is they also sought the power of digital technologies in that kind of lovely way that Peter writes about, and they did so as a way of sort of sharing their knowledge, but also actually doing it themselves.
This kind of like, we are scholar collectives and we want to do this stuff [00:17:00] ourselves. And public good is very important. But actually, so are things like experimentation and non commerciality sort of critical theory. So a lot of these journals of postmodern culture, which is, I think it might still exist today, it was a hugely important journal that existed.
And it was a very early scholar led, open access journal way before the open access movement was a thing. And they were publishing like Bell Hooks published in the first issue. So really kind of important. People were part of that. And again, that kind of comes back to sort of the smallness of it all in that.
They weren't really speaking the language of the open access movement. It was more of just a kind of a visionary thing of sort of proto open access, if you will. And then that kind of, I charted really that sort of how that logic continued throughout as digital technologies became more important.
There've always been scholar collectives who've been doing this kind of thing. And so that that idea of we can sort of do it ourselves as long as we're supported to do so, and we then make things freely available that still exists today. And then it is only obviously become more and more important through things like diamond open access, which for people who do not [00:18:00] know is, is a kind of a more ethical approach to open access where authors.
Do not pay either to access the material or to submit. And again, that has a real association with the community and with that kind of getting together and getting stuff done. So I think that what I'd like to do with the BOII, and actually they did update it and made it a lot more about the sort of issues that I interested in, which is really good.
'cause I think that they understood some of the things that went wrong is that I think. None of us could really have foreseen what would've happened with, I mean, open access, it was a good idea. There's no reason to assume that commercial publishers was gonna come in and just sort of take it all, but it ended up kind of the way it did, and now we have to do what we have to do to try and reign in some of those successes, I guess.
So I, I really locate it at the, the small community aspect as the thing which has been that common thread. And it exists before the web of course, as well, but it's always been there since the sort of the birth of the worldly small scholar journals that then carried on from there.
Heather: You talk in the book a lot about community as a source of.
Good governance and ultimately really control of your own destiny, control of intellectual [00:19:00] outputs and interaction with knowledge. Not a one ring to rule them all top-down approach, but really an approach driven up from locality and centered on community priorities. And you know, I think that's kind of the ideal behind the diamond open access model that you talked about, at least as it's been deployed in Latin America.
Local control, local priorities, lifting local voices. I would note that people often talk about. Supporting community and centering community, but it's hard to know what it actually takes to step back and break long standing habits and practices of that top down control and approach. How would you advise people to approach changing, not just their thinking about intentionally and actively centering community, but also actions?
Sam: Yeah. Firstly, I, I want to say that I try really hard not to sort of reify. Or Defi community too much. I don't think that like community can be a really bad thing as well. It can be a source of antagonism. It can be a source [00:20:00] of conflict. There are people who are excluded for bad reasons and such, and so I don't want to say that community is the thing that will fix it, but what I want to point to, I guess, is that community.
It's already the way that knowledge is produced, even if, if you have small groups of people working for a commercial publisher, that's still a community led kind of effort. So what the book kind of pushes people to do, I guess, is to think about things around like governance, like you said. So how you can design not just the rules and the kind of conflict record reconciliation methods, which is sort of really important in the common space, but also how you create a sort of normative atmosphere for getting on with one another.
And so actually a, a lot of that does start with. Thinking about your actual, your own relationships with sort of knowledge production, the actors you work with, and it sort of forces you to think about your sort of position within that. Now that's not particularly grounded in anything. It's quite theoretical, but it's still, that's why I talk quite a lot about the idea of care, because.
Care is another one of those notions which forces us to think about [00:21:00] kind of the relations that we have with the various things. And it could be care for the publishing product or it could be care for the, the labor as part of it all, or just sort of care for oneself as well, which none of those things are really present in what you would call more cookie cutter approaches to publishing, where they, they take the article.
They just sort of spit it out and they funnel it through a system. And again, fewer and fewer humans are being involved in that process. So if you start, as I do from the premise that publishing is a community led thing, it has to inextricably a human led thing as well. So you have to take ownership of those kind of relationships, which none of that's can practical.
I, I think your question was kind of alluding more to the sort of the, the practical side of things, and so. The idea is if you are already giving a lot of work to the commercial actors that I don't think are particularly good, you can redirect some of that work. You don't have to do all of it. We all, some of us have to publish for various reasons.
Some of us have to play the game. That's understandable. But actually you don't. It's not a zero sum [00:22:00] game. You can support. The small presses, the library presses, the, the university presses the people who are doing really, really good stuff. And that, to me is a good idea. 'cause, and that comes back to commons and, and kind of commenting.
That's what commenting is really. It's trying to sort of nurture the world you want with regard in this respect with regard to academic publishing.
Heather: I think it's so important that you go back to time and time again, the notion of the commons as a place where knowledge just isn't freely shared, just for people to access, but also as the locus of its production, which can facilitate that care approach, you know, much more effectively than the, I mean.
Just by their sheer size. I often think of sort of the nameless, faceless, commercialized ventures, for publishing, which I think is really, really important. you mentioned, again, you know, the idea, not just the idea, but the reality that we live in. Where the massive amount of largely invisible and you know, largely uncompensated labor that the current academic publishing and scholar communication [00:23:00] system and markets really rely on.
Could you maybe talk a little bit about one or two of the models or examples that you talked about in the book that have actually deployed strategies to address this head on?
Sam: Yeah, so. There are a number of, of different kind of experiments at the moment now, which do try to sort of like take that sort of labor issue head on.
I'm thinking one which, which sort of off the top of my head would be in the last three or four years, there've been an increasing number of journal editorial, board resignations, where they've said. We don't like the conditions that this publisher is giving us. And some of that might be that the publisher is knocking on the door and saying, you guys need to publish more articles.
You're currently not economically viable for us. You need to double, triple your output, et cetera. And so they said, actually, we, we don't wanna do that. We want to kind of land together. And so it's a collective action in the sense that they say, if you don't change your conditions, we will leave. And oftentimes yeah, they, they have to just leave.
And so you've, you've seen a number of journals that have done this now. [00:24:00] Again, if you were to look at, no, I think this is great. I think more and more people should do this, and I think that oftentimes what ends up happening is they go into not-for-profit publishers or they go to university presses, or they just strike out on their own and do their own publishing, which I think is fantastic.
That's a really great idea. Again, it's not really the thing which like I don't expect the. Academic kind of world to suddenly resign on mass from editorial boards. I love that, but it's not gonna happen. But it's the visibility of these things, which I think is really important. But it's one tactic that sheds light on the sort of extractive labor practices and also the fact that we collectively.
Actually, if we do get together, we can decide a lot of these conditions. And it might not be that we, we have to leave. It might not be as, you don't have to leave the publisher necessarily. You can demand better conditions, and that could be around allowing researchers to publish their work without embargo in a repository, those sorts of things or anything like that, really.
So it's just recognizing that actually we do have quite a lot of power. We don't have huge amount of power as individuals, but [00:25:00] collectively, if we can kind of orchestrate and, and organize. That's where the kind of the good stuff, the fun stuff really takes off. And so in any sort of intervention in, in the publishing industry, I think has to have that kind of collective element to it.
And it could be sort of the top down level. It could be kind of at the grassroots starting Euro project level. It's really, it's about sort of nurturing that collectivity. So I think that that's kind of one kind of idea which. jumps to mind. Yeah.
Heather: And I do wanna just be careful to say that, you know, as we're talking about publishers, not all publishers in the space are bad, right?
Like we have the very large behemoth commercial publishers, but then we also have publishers like the University of Michigan Press, which published your book, you know, and you've definitely alluded to and mentioned by name, a few of the players who are actually contributing positively to this evolution.
So I just, I just wanted to. Take a moment just to say we're not tarring everyone with the same, the same brush of this conversation.
Sam: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I didn't really introduce the sort of the market dynamics of publishing in a way that like, essentially at [00:26:00] my university, sort of five, five publishers publish around 50% of everything.
Then there's a 50% that's a long tail and there's a lot more kind of what you might call biblio diversity or a lot more kind of diversity in that kind of publishing market. Now I think that the, the problem with structuring publishing as a commercial market in the way that it is, is it forces even the good people to, to play that game.
And that's the main problem really. It doesn't allow them to do the stuff that we want 'em to do and to actually act ethically, it just forces them to be commercial and increasingly commercial and obviously. Left, right and center. Things are being defunded. There's less money for everything, and so that makes the forced to make the difficult and kind of bad decisions.
But you are a hundred percent right.
Heather: I, I have kind of a, a larger question for you. as somebody who's been in the open access movement since the inception, I read your book with a sense of. The familiarity of some of the questions that you called. And you know, one of the things that you note is that you really talk about open access and the OA movement as a starting point to raise larger questions about [00:27:00] how to get to something different, not the end and of itself.
And you know, something closer. To a wider spread adoption of a commons of care model. And I think what you've done is, is pretty frankly call the question of the continued relevancy of open access as a model and open access as a movement. And all movements have moments when their utility peaks and then it either dissipates or they evolve.
I'm curious what you see happening with the OA movement. Do you see a continued utility of open and open access as a tool or fill in the blank?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, I think the. From my perspective, the good thing about open access is just how sort of pluralistic it was. As much as we've been talking about it as sort of driven around open access and with this end goal, there's actually lots and lots of different approaches to that as sort of funders have become more interested in it or governments have become more interested in it.
That means that. There's been sort of resources available for people like me. I mean, I've, I've been able to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn't [00:28:00] have done because of the open access movement. So I think it's that sort of gathering of resources that you can take for interesting ends. That has been really, really helpful.
Now, I think probably you're right that the open access movement as a movement proper. Possibly less on the agenda of different organizations. Now, that doesn't mean it won't go back up the agenda, but obviously the mere idea of openness is under question because of sort of geopolitical tensions or all those sorts of things.
That means I think we have to sort of fight for the idea of openness to an extent. But also it might be okay if we take ideas of the commons and we run with them and we say, actually this is the kind of thing that we want that will give us open access. But actually if we emphasize the needs to.
Recolonize publishing, then things start to look a little bit different. And my feeling is that with the sort of the push towards ethical approaches to open access and sort of diamond open access, there probably is a space for that. And actually policy makers in particular are interested in those spaces.
So that's where the open access movement becomes, its possibly slightly more antagonistic towards commercial publishers. 'cause traditionally it [00:29:00] wasn't actually where it allowed them in, but we just emphasize something different. We say, actually we just don't want. To be driven by commercial imperatives and we can have an open access that's different to that.
So I don't really know what will happen. I mean, in some respects, open access has won the data, hasn't it? Because I mean, there's no end of stuff that's being published. Open access, there's, it's on an upward trajectory. I think more stuff is published open access than closed now in the journal space.
So if it goes in that direction, then. Maybe that's the argument made for me, but it's much like I would do so not just in publishing, but sort of outside of publishing, like worried about the marketization of the university. I'm worried about the marketization of just about everything in the world, and so joining up with the kind of people who are building alternatives outside of those spaces as well is something that I think is really, really important.
And that's a much bigger sort of political question.
Heather: Yeah. I think the last question that I had had on my list, and I'll, maybe I'll just kind of mung it in here because you got right to it is in your, the conclusion of the book, you go right. At the recognition that in order for any reform [00:30:00] in the scholarly, you know, communications or market to, to system, or market to succeed, structural and culture change has to happen at higher education institutions, right?
We have to change what it means to reward the best work, both in terms of encouraging. A much broader diversity of outputs to be valued, but also to encourage a much more diverse set of actors and people and roles, right, to be valued. Kind of ending the first author of an article or bust dynamic that we have now, and you posit that at least part of making this happen is pushing to make higher ed institutions less hierarchical.
Better able to support teams, collaboration. Right. Kind of the essence of those smaller communities moving away from individuals, but into communities. And I'm wondering if you could maybe wrap up my direct questions by talking a little bit about what you see as even any promising starting points for catalyzing that kind of structural change.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, I do think a lot of this does come down to [00:31:00] university governance and the needs to increase governance. Just to academics, just like academic publishing. Universities have been marketized and they are now governed by market logic in the same way. I, I dunno how to get there necessarily. We have unions, we have kind of people who are working in this space.
It's a continuous kind of struggle, but I don't think it requires, I mean, it requires an argument for giving more money to universities as well, and then also redistributing it within the institutions in a way that is, is more democratic a sort of, maybe like a slightly different way of thinking about is that.
Within the university, we also have this kind of idea of, of open research, so not just open access, these kind of broader practices that underpin the research process, data sharing, open peer review, open source software, all those sorts of things. And actually. My feeling is if you make that about kind of governance and you make that about kind of changing the university, then the conversation starts to become quite interesting because you are encouraging people to experiment with how they practice knowledge production.
It's not just [00:32:00] about how they share stuff at the end of it, it's how they actually. Engage in different forms of kind of sharing their work or presenting their work or doing all those sorts of things. And in doing so, you get them just kind of interested in something different. And so moving away from what you might call those kind of, those sort of rarey practices that we all do.
Like, I mean, the reason I published the book was because my advisor told me if I wanted an academic job, I had to publish a book. Now I'm very happy I did publish that book, but actually it would've been nice to have the opportunity to do something kind of radically different and to not have to worry about those sorts of things.
And so. We think about it from a sort of practice level, then I think it starts, yeah, it starts to become a bit of a different conversation beyond the focus on like universities requiring things to be open access and actually universities encouraging people to engage openly with themselves and their processes.
And I think that the reason that's really important is that in the UK in particularly. Libraries have been sort of transformed almost into these sort of compliance bodies where a lot of what they do is, yeah, they have to [00:33:00] check that people are publishing open access and making sure that stuff is in a repository, and we have a lot of money to do that.
Now, a lot of that money or those resources and those stuff could be spent. Encouraging those open practices and getting people on board with it in that kind of way. So I think that's one way I could see the open movement actually ticking off in a different direction, is if you focus on practice and you focus on enabling different kinds of practices.
Rewarding, like you say, rewarding and crediting all these different things that are going on, not just the individual research article, but the technicians that support it at the library staff and all those sorts of things.
Dave Hansen: When I read your book, I kind of think of well counterpoints or examples of things that like maybe have been successful but have scaled in some way and haven't some, at least to date, been gobbled up by Elsevier.
And so the two examples were loss and archive and whether you know, particularly with your experience with them, 'cause you have some direct experience, like any lessons plus or minus from what they have done.
Sam: So the reason I'm interested in open access is 'cause my first job. [00:34:00] After being a struggling musician in my kind of early twenties was at plus.
And so I, I was sort of part of the journal plus one, and it was exactly around the time when plus one had developed this model, as I'm sure many of us know about. But they were no longer interested in publishing things based on how interesting those findings are, but as long as they'd been done correctly.
And so they invented what's called the kind of concept of the mega journal where they would receive APCs and they'd publish it. It would be peer reviewed, but it would no longer be published for novelty value. And so. They were the ones really who created a lot of those issues around kind of APCs and that drive for scale Now.
In biomedical publishing, they were always kind of used to paying to publish. It was a thing which they had already done. You'd give publishers money for color figures and those sorts of things. So it was a sort of an extension of the ways in which they'd already published and then nature turned up and they're like, actually, if we wanna copy this, this is great.
Like you guys are paying, like they gave you $2,000 an article, however much it was, and then kind of bad things kind of issue. But I think that what Plus did was they actually. Some of the smaller things [00:35:00] they did, they had like these things called community journals. So I know coming back to the idea of community, they had this called Plus Genetics, plus computational biology.
These are all really cool community led journals. And that model I think is something that I wish had been the kind of the dominant one that had kind of stuck. But again, it's not. It's too expensive to fund humans to do stuff. Again, you need it. It's big and scalable stuff. The archive is definitely a a, a better example, and I love the archives so much.
I think it's just like the coolest thing and it's sustained by kind of these weird mechanisms over the past however many years. And that, the good thing about that is it again, it tapped into like plastered, it tapped in to how high energy physicists already shared their work. They were already a kind of.
A Preprinting community in as early as the fifties and the sixties. Once you commit, you've finished your experiment. You just sent out your paper in the post to your collaborators and when the kind of, when email came and FTP servers and, and the web, that allowed them to sort of slightly open that list up or [00:36:00] in some respects, democratize that so that you, you didn't have to be on an exclusive club or an exclusive list to get access to those papers.
All these things have to. To some extent fit with the traditions of how people work, but at the same time do so in a way that nudges them in a kind of good direction. That's really what I think, and so I, I hope I didn't come across as too negative about plus, but I also think that, like I had, I guess I had my, my part in, in that.
In the, kind of the, the publishing system at that point and how it turned out. But, but I didn't work for Elsevier though, Heather.
Heather: Hey, it was 11 months. I didn't make the full contract, but it went to Elsevier actually from the American Astronomical Society where, because I'm much, much older than uem, I actually worked on converting their journals from print to electronic.
And so we were working on translating the journals into the, you know, the. Brand new internet environment while Paul Ginsberg was creating archive. And we had tons of conversations and we actually, we published the conversation between [00:37:00] us as publishers of journals and Paul as the creator of the archive in physics today about the fact that scientists used articles, they used those two outlets in different ways.
They used. Paul's outlet, you know, archive to communicate and they use the journals to convert prestige, right? For it was crystal clear in 1993, right? What the bifurcation was that needed to be addressed. So that'll tell you where we are still in having that same competition.
Dave Hansen: I have to ask this one because it possibly wins the award for most cynical question.
The question is, what are some cool ways that commercial publishers might integrate the idea of care and pervert its intentions and weaponize it for profit?
Sam: I mean, they're already doing that, aren't they? Yeah, they are already t taking all of that care and turning it into a logic of choice and,extraction.
I mean, yeah. I dunno. Heather, do you have any.
Heather: It's the right question to ask. I think it's just to be aware that with every strategy, there's a countervailing. I mean, [00:38:00] if it was not an $11 billion a year revenue market, you wouldn't have the vehement or the assurance of pushback, which you have, which no matter action you take, you have to be ready for.
There's gonna be an element of massive pushback, but being prepared is
Sam: all we can
Heather: do.
Sam: But yeah, I do think, like, so one, one theorist I, I talk about in the book is Anne-Marie Mo, who talks about care in opposition to choice. And she talks about it in, in actually in the sense of kind of medical care and how care itself is something that's kind of.
Individually situated, and it requires people to actually learn about the person and all those sorts of things. Whereas choice is more of a kind of something you enter into and you just, you personally are responsible for your own kind of medical needs. You choose whatever the kind of, um, device you need or whatever the kind of treatment is.
And the point that she makes is that care just does not fit market logic. It just, it, they just don't work together because the moment you introduce people having different needs. The market doesn't know what to do with [00:39:00] that very well. It's, it's, it wants to give you all the same stuff or the smallest amount of work possible to give you whatever it is you need.
so I think that they are kind of oppositional, even though they're being extracted at the same time.
Dave Hansen: One more here. How do you navigate balancing your perspective in the book, as you described with your role at Cambridge? You know, for example, thinking about read and publishing agreements that might come across your desk.
What role do you have in achieving or promoting those agreements and, you know, just answering author questions related to them?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly difficult because, like I said, 50% of our research output is with, with these five big commercial publishers now. I think I can say in the past that the library has tried to recommend canceling, but the University of Cambridge is a researcher governed institution, and uh, in some instances they have just said, actually, no, this is too important to us.
If we can afford it, you get us the best deal. And that's really what we can do. That's not always [00:40:00] the case. In some universities it can, there is more centralization and you can kind of override those sort of concerns. But at bottom. That many researchers are deciding they want to publish in that way. It would be very, very difficult for the University of Cambridge to cancel those sorts of things.
even when we say what we should, we think we should do the thing about open access in the UK is that it's been this kind of mixed bag of freeing up lots of resources for article processing charges for the bad stuff. But at the same time, the government were quite shrewd and they said, you know what?
You can use this stuff. In any way that supports our policies. And so at the same time you have a host of new university presses that have launched in the uk. So we have a real resurgent university press ecosystem that's subsidized by its host institutions. So thinking about that kind of 1960s US, the kind of golden era of the subsidized university press, it's nothing like that, but it's in the direction of a subsidized breath.
They don't have to publish for purely commercial reasons, and that really is because of the open access [00:41:00] agenda. So trying to find spaces. To divert that money because some of it does exist, is really what I do try to do. But at the end of the day it becomes more of a research culture issue where it's like if, if you guys are gonna continue doing this, like we have to keep supporting that.
We need you to change and we do try to get you to change, but like there's only so much you can do.
Dave Hansen: I just wanna thank Sam and Heather for a really great talk, super interesting issue and your approach to it in the book.
Sam: Thank you. I appreciate that. And thanks. Thanks very much for the conversation, Heather.
Chris Freeland: Thank you both for your time today. I wanna make sure that everyone has grabbed your copy of Publishing Beyond the Market. Again, you can read an open access edition online, download the PDF or the EPUB, or purchase it in print. Thanks all. Have a great day.
Thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow.
