The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) Conference took place on the 16–18 September in Lisbon this year. Some of us — Joe Deville and Judith Fathallah — represented the Open Book Collective, alongside a number of other colleagues from the Copim communities. These included Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers), Vincent Van Gerven Oei (punctum books), Anna Hughes (Jisc) and Niels Stern and Silke Davison (both DOAB/OAPEN).

Several of the panel themes resonated with our concerns at Copim, including those that focused on equity, open infrastructure, and moving away from Book Processing Charges as a model for open access (OA) books. OASPA has recently released recordings of all the plenary sessions. These recordings prompted us to revisit our notes on the event and to reflect on the event as a whole. In this reflection, we have pulled out themes that particularly resonated with us, linking to the recordings where relevant, as well as reflecting on our own panel.

Who cares about equity?

The opening discussion of the conference was titled ‘Who cares about equity? How different stakeholders of the open access scholarly publishing landscape approach equity’. Equity, particularly as understood from a global and intersectional perspective, was a running theme of the conference. In this first panel, which was moderated by Copim alumna Agata Morka, panelists discussed the idea of equity through different lenses from stakeholders in different contexts: in an audience mentimeter, we saw that delegates associated equity with ideas of fairness, justice, inclusion and diversity. Justice in terms of access to resources was a theme picked up by Durhan Wong, a patient advocate from Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders, and by Joy Owango from the Training Centre in Communication, University of Nairobi. They spoke about the differing needs of researchers in different geographic, economic and institutional contexts, pointing out the error of conflating equity with equality, which assumes that all stakeholders operate with the same advantages.

Reggie Raju of University of Cape Town Libraries, who is also a Steward of the Open Book Collective, picked up these themes in a panel titled ‘Show me the money: decoupling OA from per-publication journal charges’. Reggie argued for a system of OA publishing underscored by principles of social justice, which deconstructs historical barriers to reading and publishing and advances decolonization and demarginalization. Reggie stated that an OA system dependent on payments to publish is ‘catastrophic’ for African academics — as it is for precariously employed scholars, scholars without research funding, and many on teaching contracts. On the third day, in the panel ‘Building Equity in Open Access: Tools, Frameworks, Recommended Practices’, Omo Oaiya from WACREN reflected that equity means more than access to information: it means involvement and the involves the question of whose voices are involved in the discussion and whose voices are missing.

OA and precarity in the academic landscape

In our own panel, ‘Open Access and Precarity in the Academic Landscape’, chaired by Caroline Edwards (Open Library of Humanities/Birkbeck, University of London) we also explored questions of equity from our perspectives as academics involved with OA at different stages in our careers and from differing national contexts. Speaking as a precariously-employed scholar who has chosen OBC member mediastudies.press as the publisher of her third academic monograph, Judith argued that the legacy publishing strategies which have rewarded previous academic cohorts with permanent positions no longer serve ECRs and PhD students in the same way, casualization is ‘endemic’  in UK academia, with 46% of universities and 60% of colleges using zero hour contracts to deliver teaching and 68% of research staff in higher education on fixed term contracts. Judith argued that given this reality, the citation advantage, exposure, and personalized support she received from a small, scholar-led, OA publisher is more personally advantageous than outdated associations of ‘prestige’ connected with corporate names, even before one considers the ethical drivers of OA.

Joe then spoke from his perspective as a Trustee of Mattering Press, another small scholar-led publisher and a founding member of the OBC, the latter of which Joe is also involved with as Managing Director. Joe highlighted some of the different ways in which precarity cuts through scholar-led publishing. He drew examples from his own press but also other parts of the OA publishing system, including in other scholar-led presses, drawing on an interview with Eileen Joy from punctum books, and globally, reprising Reggie Raju’s earlier arguments. Precarity in OA publishing, he argued, needs to be understood as not just financial but also relating to how the scholarly system produces varied forms of exclusion and marginalisation, both locally and globally. He concluded by showing the way that the new revenue streams from the OBC have helped Mattering Press address at least some of the financial precarity the press has long experienced. The full text of Joe’s talk is available on the Mattering Press website.

The panel concluded with Nonhlanhla Dube, a lecturer at Lancaster University and a co-founder of the Southern Women’s Academic Network (SWAN) reflecting on the unintended effects of exclusive open access arrangements in Global South institutions. Institutions that enjoy these arrangements can be exploitative as desperate researchers seek affiliation to get their work out. Nonhlanhla explored bigger questions including both ‘who pays?’ for OA as well as how legitimacy is defined. Regarding the former question, the knowledge generated by Global South scholars is often without compensation — whether in terms of research time or costs incurred to do the work; but to publish it, they have to either pay upfront or publish for free and their knowledge is then kept under lock and key for readers to foot the bill. Regarding the latter question, the systems by which the legitimacy of publishers is defined favours the Global North hegemony, meaning that perfectly valid knowledge does not get recognized. The peer review process is also tied into ways of working largely defined by major commercial publishers in the Global North. Nonhlanhla concluded her talk with 4 key questions for the audience: What is the problem we are trying to address with open access? How have I (a stakeholder in publishing) been a part of the problem? What am I (the stakeholder) willing to give up to make things right? What new thing will take its place?

Signs of hope?

Academic publishing is changing rapidly. It is easy to feel trepidation and uncertainty at precarious situations we find ourselves in: as authors, as scholars, as publishers, as librarians, as OA activists. The corporate buyout of OA initiatives and platforms is accelerating, and we are seeing the increasing use of mechanisms such as BPCs and transformative agreements that threaten the goals and spirit of the OA movement, to the detriment of equity, bibliodiversity and the quality of scholarship.

However, initiatives like the Open Book Collective do, in our view, offer genuine alternatives, alongside the wider range of work in the Copim Open Book Futures project. They are helping to build some much needed foundations of equity in scholarly research and book publishing, while addressing key issues of precarity. They offer real hope, in our view, that it could become possible for an increasing number of authors, from a wider and more diverse range of academic contexts, move towards much more open book publishing journies, with direct impacts on publishing equity and precarity. Although there is certainly much more work to do, we do see a possibility where, in time, many more texts could flow through open source production infrastructures, at publishers receiving more stable revenue streams from Diamond open access funding models, and distributed by maximally open metadata, and all this via organizations that are community-led and non-profit. This, in turn, promises to remove some of the barriers to access for authors, while normalizing publishing in a more diverse range of places and ways, and extending the impact of openly published scholarship.

We are not naive: inequalities in the scholarly system are deeply entangled with intransigent forces and the continuing effects of local and global histories. Supporting new, open publishing models and infrastructures needs to be part of a wider effort to deliver social justice in academic work. Nonetheless, we are keen to play our part, as we can.

Get in touch

If you are a scholarly publisher or librarian working in line with our key values, we invite you to contact us ([email protected]), or explore our website to learn more about the ways we are enabling transition to a future for OA books that is equitable, sustainable, and collaborative, leaving BPCs behind via collaborative funding mechanisms that allow a truly diverse publishing ecosystem to thrive.