Commonplace
Labour of Love: An Open
Access Manifesto for
Freedom, Integrity, and
Creativity in the
Humanities and
Interpretive Social
Sciences
Andrea E. Pia1, Simon Batterbury2, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi3,
Marcel LaFlamme4, Gerda Wielander5, Filippo M. Zerilli6,
Melissa Nolas7, Jon Schubert8, Nicholas Loubere9,
Ivan Franceschini10, Casey Walsh11, Agathe Mora12,
Christos Varvantakis7
1London School of
Economics, and co-editor, Made in China Journal,
2University
of Melbourne and Lancaster University, and co-editor, Journal of Political Ecology,
3University
of Zurich, and co-editor of Roadsides,
4Ludwig
Boltzmann Gesellschaft and executive committee, Libraria,
5University
of Westminster, and editor of British Journal of Chinese Studies,
6University
of Cagliari, and editor of Anuac Journal,
7Goldsmiths University,
and co-editor of Entanglements: experiments in multimodal
ethnography,
8Brunel University
9 Lund University,
London, member of the editorial collective at Allegra Lab,
and co-editor, Made in China Journal,
10The Australian National University,
and co-editor, Made in China Journal,
11University
of California Santa Barbara and co-editor, Journal of Political Ecology,
12University
of Sussex, member of the editorial collective at Allegra Lab
Published on: Jul 16, 2020
DOI: 10.21428/6 d8432.a7503356
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
Over the next decade, Open Access (OA) is likely to become the def ault in scholarly publishing. Yet, as
commercial publishers develop new models for capturing revenue (and as policy initiatives like Plan S
remain reluctant to challenge their centrality), researchers, librarians, and other concerned observers
are beginning to articulate a set of values that critically engages the industry-driven project of
broadening access to specialist scholarship.
While alternative genealogies exist, conversations about OA in the Global North have largely been
concerned with the model of the STEM disciplines, lately shifting to focus on the development of
infrastructural fixes that transcend traditional journal formats and enforce the openness of research
data and protocols. There has been f ar less discussion about the political implications of labour and
value in OA, particularly as they relate to the defence of what we perceive as increasingly imperiled
principles of academic freedom , integrity, and creativity.
The undersigned are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are
questioning the f airness and scientif ic tenability of a system of scholarly communication
dominated by large commercial publishers. With this manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access
to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and
unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles
experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon.
In this manifesto we mobilise an extended notion of research output, which encompasses the work of
building and maintaining the systems, processes, and relations of production that make scholarship
possible. We believe that the humanities and social sciences are too often disengaged from the public
and material afterlives of their scholarship. We worry that our fields are sleepwalking into a new phase
of control and capitalisation, to include continued corporate extraction of value and transparency
requirements designed by managers, entrepreneurs, and politicians.
We fervently believe that OA can be a powerful tool to advance the ends of civil society and social
movements. But opening up the products of our scholarship without questioning how this is done,
who stands to prof it from it, what model of scholarship is being normalised, and who stands to
be silenced by this process may come at a particularly high cost for scholars in the humanities and
social sciences.
Indeed, we run the risk of flattening our voices and aspirations onto a purely quantitative horizon
of metrics that makes knowledge a remunerative asset for corporate players, precisely because it
reproduces existing hierarchies in knowledge production and higher education. When scholars from
the Global South are charged high fees to publish in “prestigious” OA journals with a reach in the
Global North, what happens to the original democratising spirit of Open Access? In this respect, STEM
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
researchers, predominantly in the Global North, are directing the conversation in a particular way by
arguing that freely accessible data is a prerequisite for the global knowledge commons, without
due consideration of what consequences their proposals could have on the “soft” sciences or on
existing inequalities within North-South research collaborations.
As humanities and social science scholars, we want to reclaim the project of Open Access and key it to a
different register of shared creativity and responsibility. Pushing Open Access beyond its corporate
limits means challenging the many enclosures to which we as scholars and knowledge workers in
research institutions tacitly consent. Why do many of us not consider the ethical status of the outlets
where we publish, but only their prestige? Why do we review scholarship the way that we do? How do
we write, and for whom?
What is clear to us is that the future of a more accessible, ethical, transparent, and creative form
of scholarly communication largely relies on a labour of love—unremunerated, off-work time that is
freely given as a result of political, emotional and otherwise idealistic investment in projects that
transcend the quest for academic prestige and seek to transform the publishing system from within.
However, scholar-led OA publishing can also benefit from the expertise and institutional solidity of
other actors. While scholars can provide the carefully-argued analysis, the peer review, and the
editorial work, we also need the support of our universities, libraries, and other like-minded
organisations to ensure that our collective effort can be sustained, archived, and scaled up to meet the
challenge of the digital information era.
After a brief review of the context that prompted us to take action, we advance a number of
recommendations through which we hope to enlist new allies and fellow travelers in our quest for the
commonif ication of Open Access—scholarship that is collaboratively and responsibly built and
shared.
The Paradox of the Knowledge Commons
In recent decades, academic publishing has been transformed into a highly prof itable business. In
the past, scholarly journals were primarily published through professional associations or academic
institutions; today, many are owned or distributed by commercial publishers with large profit
margins. These profits are achieved through a system of academic exploitation: not only is the writing
and reviewing provided free to the publisher, but authors are increasingly required to pay an article
processing charge (APC) to avoid having their work being placed behind expensive paywalls. Libraries
f ace a rapid increase in costs, at an aggregate rate of
their contents.
4
11% per annum, to maintain access to journals and
Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
Meanwhile, insof ar as publication in “high-ranking” journals and name-brand presses is required for
jobs, tenure, funding, and research assessment exercises of all kinds, academics feel under
increasing pressure to “play the game.” This has serious implications for scholars with
interdisciplinary or otherwise unconventional research agendas, and it places enormous pressure on
early-career and precarious academics. It is particularly punishing for women, who are still
disproportionately charged with various forms of care work.
While this dismal state of aff airs is f ast approaching what property rights theorists call “a tragedy of
the anti-commons,” the irony of seeing the same communities that make qualitative social scientific
research possible excluded from full participation in the production of knowledge (in the form of
expensive journal subscriptions and APC charges) is too often lost on researchers consumed with the
forward progress of their own careers.
Over the past few years, a number of high-profile incidents have further exposed the corrosive
influence of commercial considerations, including the willingness to censor content in order to
maintain access to profitable markets. In August
2017
, it was revealed that Cambridge University Press
had complied with the demands of Chinese government censors to block access within China to over
three hundred “politically sensitive” articles published in the prestigious journal, China Quarterly.
Prompted by public outcry, the press ultimately reversed its stance, restoring access to the censored
contents for Chinese readers and making them available free of charge for all.
Unfortunately the Cambridge University Press incident was just the tip of the iceberg, and there have
been numerous other examples of major publishers censoring content on behalf of the Chinese
government . In October
2018
, it was revealed that Springer Nature had been removing chapters
dealing with “sensitive subjects” from its Transcultural Research book series, unbeknownst to the
authors or editors. Despite public outrage from the academic community, Springer Nature remained
defiant. The company refused to reverse its actions and justified them as being necessary for the
advancement of research.
These incidents expose the paradox at the heart of contemporary academic publishing—the f act that
academics are effectively required to hand over their research, which is often supported by public
funding, to publishers whose primary goal is to earn profit rather than to make the material freely and
uncompromisingly accessible. This entrenched system of rewards and incentives, rather than the
conditions for publication being put in place by Plan S, is the real threat to academic freedom.
Yet freely accessible scholarship is not free of political ramif ications and is not necessarily
ethical in its own right . Within anthropology, allegations of abuse, misconduct, and exploitation at
the formerly open-access journal HAU have cast a long shadow on the prospects of placing open-access
initiatives on a better footing within the discipline. HAU’s recent transition to an “open access cum
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
subscription” model has de facto armed doubters with a powerful argument for why OA may never
work without the stewardship of the most conservative players in the industry.
Even so, disquiet with the status quo is growing, and numerous projects across the social sciences and
humanities are experimenting with alternative publishing models. The HAU scandal has, for instance,
inspired a call by anthropologists and scholars in neighboring disciplines for “ethical” Open Access.
Rather than thriving on self-exploitation and a toxic culture of prestige, OA publishing can indeed be
made ethically viable while remaining financially sustainable and inclusive. But this may require that
the battle for Open Access be moved to a different terrain than the one of serendipity and personal
alliances. To reconfigure the publishing ecology of academia as OA proponents advocate, the
conversation needs to turn to questions of f inancing, ownership, and, above all, values.
Under the banner of concepts like bibliodiversity, slow OA, and community-owned infrastructure, the
alternative publishing networks that are emerging today aim to sustain the conditions of possibility for
scholar-led projects that are not driven by the pursuit of impact f actors, but are run on a minimal
budget as a “labour of love.” New models aimed at reversing the course of the current system may
come in the form of subscribe-to-open agreements between libraries and publishers or looser mutual
aid relationships that are not predicated on centralized control.
What can we, as researchers, do? We can reinvigorate ties with journals published by scholarly
societies. We can act creatively to reclaim ownership over the free labour that we mindlessly offer to
commercial actors. We can conjure digital infrastructures (think of platforms from OJS to Janeway,
PubPub, and beyond) that operate in the service of the knowledge commons. Scholar-led OA
publishing has the power to bypass gatekeeping institutions, bridge the knowledge gap produced by
commercially driven censorship, and provide support to homegrown digital activism in countries
where access to scholarship is restricted. All of this, without neglecting scholarly institutions such as a
constructive peer review process or other forms of consensus-building and quality assurance proper to
the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
How can we enable these projects—increase their reach, tap into new forms of support, reduce
duplication of effort, ward off burnout and discouragement—while being honest about the drawbacks
of their institutionalization? Is it possible for projects like these to share certain kinds of social and
technical infrastructure, while retaining their autonomy and the experimental edge that makes
them so vital?
Recommendations
We invite comment on and further development of the following recommendations.
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
For Authors
. Consider Open Access as more than a publishing format; rather, it should be seen as part of a
broader political project that considers the
relationship between scholarship and its multiple
publics.
. Think about the ethics of the forum in which you are publishing. Just as we all have to think about
our travel, personal consumption, and energy usage in a carbon-constrained world, try to publish in
outlets whose values align with your own.
. The publish-or-perish mentality prevalent in academia results in scholars publishing ever-smaller
chunks of their research across as many articles as possible. Think about the consequences that
this behaviour has on the quality of your scholarship as well as the public communicability of
your work.
. Recognise that not all Open Access is necessarily socially just . So-called predatory open-access
initiatives can seek to capture limited OA funds without regard for quality and thereby siphon
resources away from reputable OA journals.
For Senior Scholars
. The scrutiny of job applications, tenure and promotion needs to undergo a revolution. These
processes are what drives much of the obsession with publishing in expensive, “high-impact”
journals. Surprisingly, senior academics (like some among us) don't step outside the box much and
are appreciative of high citation counts, big-name journals, and other conventional criteria when
assessing the “excellence” of candidates. While assessment criteria are discipline-dependent, it is
important to actually read the work, discounting its place of publication. An article in an ethical
scholar-led journal, a regional journal, or a journal published in a language other than English
should receive consideration on its merits, along with articles in so-called top journals. It is
scientif ically untenable to do otherwise.
For Deans and Provosts
. A candidate can come up for hiring or promotion who is absolutely brilliant and whose work is
published primarily in DIY or socially just OA journals. Don't penalize them for these choices.
For Librarians
. Library budgets are under severe strain, and this is sure to be exacerbated by the f allout of the
19 pandemic. Under these
COVID-
conditions, preserving access to currently available content is a
logical starting point. But consider supporting scholar-led publishing, whether by small
subventions to projects led by f aculty and staff at your institution or (more boldly) projects that
originate elsewhere but that contribute to a knowledge commons from which all can benefit.
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
Increasingly, platform-and consortium-scale initiatives make it possible to connect with these
projects, which are cheaper than the overpriced mainstream and which point the way to the future
of publishing.
For Journal Editors
. “Flipping” existing journals (from toll access to an OA publishing model) is a big step: consider
taking it, in conversation with supporters and the resources they can provide. Also, agitate for
other journals to do the same: there is strength and bargaining power in numbers.
. Accept and foster more public-oriented scholarship. Scholars in the humanities and social
sciences should strive to publish in ways that will make academic research understandable for
larger audiences: that is, spell out clearly and concisely its societal relevance and the ethical
soundness of its methodology, reduce the use of jargon, use non-textual and other experimental
formats. Publish work that “cares.”
. Consider rethinking the peer review process more broadly, entertaining innovations such as open
peer review or publication (alongside the articles themselves) of reviews to f acilitate more fruitful
exchange between scholars.
. Ask reviewers to consult the COPE guidelines for ethical peer reviewing, and consider adopting
diversity and inclusion in citational practices as an explicit criterion on which submissions are
evaluated. Make the labour of editing and reviewing more transparent and recognise it (rather
than simply filing it under 'service'). This could potentially be done through establishing awards
for reviews, which would help to recognize them as intellectual contributions without reducing
them to yet another metric. Provide additional support for new peer reviewers.
For Our Fellow Independent Journal Editors
. Begin to explore options for pooling resources: when you apply for funding as part of a grant, there
may be a benef it to casting your request in terms of a publishing cooperative. While
collective decision-making can get bogged down in endless rounds of process, there may be
economies of scale and pools of expertise to be accessed by working together. This might also
include cost and labour reduction strategies, such as sharing copyeditors, reviewer databases, or
other IT and non-IT infrastructure.
. Even as we try to free ourselves from commercial publishers and other proprietary systems, we
also need to pay attention to what new dependencies we create. Web developers for open-
access platforms, for example, are usually underpaid and potentially exploited. Ask hard
questions about the corners you may be cutting.
. Publishing on platforms that we control also offers creative opportunities that we are not yet
engaging in. Scholar-led publications mostly replicate existing formats, e.g. making articles
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
available as PDFs. Existing standards for citation may make this a necessity, but we need to pioneer
new standards even as we branch out into web-native formats with clear advantages in terms of
accessibility and preservation.
. Posting catchy or “in your f ace” content on social media can draw attention to scholar-led
publications and boost their visibility. While social media is crucial, being effectively present on it is
time-consuming and politically sensitive work that should be rewarded both in terms of
compensation and professional recognition.
. While rising submission numbers can be one index of a journal’s reach, they can also grow beyond
the point of staff or reviewer capacity. Keep a watchful eye on how this burden is distributed
and consider just ways to cap submissions, such as requiring some form of in-kind investment
in the project.
. The humanities and social sciences need new metrics for the impact they have in the world.
Participate in crafting them, even while pushing back against metricization on other fronts.
. Formalise principles for evaluating alternative publishing models and arrangements:
sources of support (e.g. cash vs. in-kind); infrastructure (e.g. original or adopted, vulnerability to
commercial capture); governance (e.g. nature of the legal entity); the “ground game” (e.g. social
infrastructure for enlisting and retaining supporters).
. Begin working toward a formal and comprehensive benchmarking for scholar-led OA
publications; this could be anonymized to dispel worries about the disclosure of sensitive
information. Relatedly, explore the implementation of a certif ication system for scholar-led OA
publications, attesting that a publication is academically sound (driven by scholarly concerns,
having editorial independence as well as checks and balances on individual figures, providing high-
quality peer review, using DOIs, backing up its data); responsive; sustainable (arranging for long-
term preservation of its output); focused on equity (pays its copyeditors, typesetters, and IT staff
a f air wage, unless these tasks are performed by the editors themselves) and actively working
against inequities in knowledge production and access. The DOAJ Seal is an existing example
of such a certification, which could be critically evaluated and supplemented as needed.
Acknowledgments
This
Manifesto
is the result of an LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment–funded workshop
entitled “Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences,” organised by
Andrea E. Pia and held at the London School of Economics on September
9 2019
,
.
We would also like to acknowledge the support and contributions of the following people: Rita Astuti,
Frances Cleaver, Martin Eve, Katy Gardner, Nancy Graham, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, Deborah James,
Stephanie Kitchen, Alex Loftus, Bethany Logan, Max Mosterd, Ross Mounce, Itay Noy, Helen Porter,
Lara Speicher, Charles Stafford and Jemima Warren.
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Commonplace Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences
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