Community-Based Open Access, Fast and Slow #hautalk - Allegra

"(With others) I have tried to make the ethical case for OA on too many other occasions already. I feel like a broken record (what we owe the communities we engage and study; global and intra-societal inequality; corporate enclosures; tuition-driven student debt; textbook costs; the degradation of scholarly libraries; regulatory capture; tragedies of the anti-commons; intellectual propertization; self-piracy, other issues…) The OA world is already too baroque, with too many confusing distinctions (corporate, predatory, green, gold, author-pays, etc.) and legal/technical systems. I am sorry that it has been so hard for us to collectively make sense of it and to act on what we have learned. I have tried to help. As with HAU, it sometimes seems a lot easier to just do OA than to explain and weigh OA. Our projects thrive (or, as with HAU, for a time appear to thrive) even as our discussions fail over and over again.

In this context, I worry about drawing out a new set of distinctions, but I think that they relate to the work of making sense of HAU....

Scholars, they argue, should get back to scholarship and let publishers do the work of publishing. Setting out to prove such voices wrong, HAU has now provided a lot of evidence to support just this contention. That really bums me out, because in the shadow of fast and giant HAU are many smaller, slower, more patient, experimental, and humanely-scaled DIY publishing efforts. Those efforts aspire to do, and clearly do do, ethical work in ethical ways and at a scale that enhances the life of those who participate in them...."