Pirate Radical Philosophy – Radical Philosophy

"Peter Suber, a leading voice in the open access movement, has recently provided an instance of just such a withdrawal. In January, Suber announced (using Google+ to do so) that he would ‘not referee for a publisher belonging to the Association of American Publishers unless it has publicly disavowed the AAP’s position on the Research Works Act’. The latter, which was introduced in the US Congress on 16 December 2011, was designed to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research in the USA. The Research Works Act would thus in effect countermand the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy along with other similar open access policies in the USA. To show my support for open access and Suber’s initiative, I publicly stated in January that I would act similarly. [17] Having met with staunch opposition from within both the academic and the publishing communities, all public backing of the Research Works Act has now been dropped as of 27 February. But I can’t help wondering, rather than taking this as a cue to abandon the strategy of refusal, should we not adopt it all the more? Should we not withdraw our academic labour from all those presses and journals that do not allow authors, as a bare minimum, to self-archive the refereed and accepted final drafts of their publications in institutional open access repositories? [18]

As a supporter of long standing, I feel it is important to acknowledge that the open access movement – which is concerned with making peer-reviewed research literature freely available online to all those able to access the Internet – is neither unified nor self-identical. Some regard it as a movement, [19] yet for others it represents a variety of economic models or even just another means of distribution, marketing and promotion. It should also be borne in mind that there is nothing inherently radical, emancipatory, oppositional, or even politically or culturally progressive about open access. The politics of open access depend on the decisions that are made in relation to it, the specific tactics and strategies that are adopted, the particular conjunctions of time, situation and context in which such practices, actions and activities take place, and the networks, relationships and flows of culture, community, society and economics they encourage, mobilize and make possible. Open access publishing is thus not necessarily a mode of left resistance.

Nevertheless, what is interesting about the transition to the open access publication and archiving of research is the way it is creating at least some ‘openings’ that allow academics to destabilize and rethink scholarly publishing, and with it the university, beyond the model espoused by free-market capitalism...."