EUI Open Access Roundtable: presentations available online

This year’s Open Access roundtable focused on “Young Scholars between Open Access and Traditional Publishing”. It took place on Thursday morning 23 October at the EUI (Badia Fiesolana).

The roundtable is organised annually at the EUI in the framework of the International Open Access week.

The presentations are now available via this post.

Open Access at the EUI: Cadmus
Lotta Svantesson, EUI Repository Manager

Rebel OA: or How (Not) to Publish in the Era of Open Access, Open Data and Open Source
Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts; Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University; Co-founder / Co-director of Open Humanities Press

In Technics and Time French philosopher Bernard Stiegler shows how Western philosophy has forgotten that its origins lie with technics – how it has in fact “repressed technics as an object of thought”. In my contribution to Generation Open I will show how today many scholars and researchers likewise forget and repress the media technologies by which their own work is not only produced, published and distributed, but also commodified and privatised by for-profit companies operating as part of the cultural industries. (Ironically enough, this includes Stiegler himself.)
Such repression is noticeable when research is made available via transnational corporations associated with disruptive digital technologies, including social and mobile media, search engines and the cloud. Witness the way neoliberal “technologies of the self” such as Facebook and Twitter are encouraging early career researchers in particular to be highly visible entrepreneurs of themselves. When it comes to publishing their PhDs, many junior scholars are now finding themselves in the position of having to take on the responsibility for managing, branding, promoting and marketing their work, ideas and charismatic authorial personalities by disseminating their research using tweets, blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos. They have to do so in order to gain advantage in the competition for jobs, book contracts, funding, attention, recognition, fame.
Yet nowhere is this repression and forgetfulness regarding the commodification of knowledge more evident than from the way in which academic research and publication continues to be dominated, for scholars at all levels, by the print-on-paper codex book and journal article, together with many of the concepts and practices that have been inherited with them from the era of writing, the book, and especially the industrialisation of printing that took place from the middle of the 18th century onwards. The latter include the individualized author, the proprietorial subject, intellectual property and copyright. But they also include the signature, the proper noun or name, uniform multiple-copy editions, the long-form argument, fixity and originality. In fact, these historically inherited concepts and practices contribute intimately to the ongoing privatisation of knowledge and research by for-profit publishers through their continued shaping of the conditions of possibility in the academy.
Drawing on my experience as co-founder and co-director of Open Humanities Press, I will demonstrate how the transition to Open Access is creating opportunities for us to rebel against both of these cultural industry-dominated models – both the classic ‘closed’ and the newer ‘semi-closed’– when it comes to the production, publication and distribution of our knowledge and research.

In the Netherlands, secretary of state for Science & Education, Mr. Dekker, has made it loud and clear that he wants the Dutch contribution to the global scholarly record to be 100% open access in 2024, and already 60% in 2019. For Dekker, the only road to achieve this is the ‘golden road’: articles published in open access journals, preferably full open access, but hybrid OA is allowed. At the same time he announced that he is not willing to pay any extra money for it and called upon all parties, publishers, universities / research institutes and funders, to work out the details, change business models and make The Netherlands the first 100% OA country in the world. Critics say Dekker’s emphasis on gold open access will bring only fool’s gold: it looks shiny at the start, but will not deliver on its promises. In that sense they call Dekker’s initiative naïve. But is it?

Open Data at the EUI
Thomas Bourke, Library Information specialist, Economics

Twitter feed: #OAweekTableEUI