An ethics of care: what kind of open access do we want?

I’m going to talk about open access, in the context of a neoliberalised academy, and about ways of thinking about open access that bring the focus back on values and ethics, rather than boring things like compliance rates or citation advantages. Over the past five years or so there’s been significant progress made in what we like to optimistically call a transition to open access, and in the UK a lot of this work has been done by people working in libraries to implement research funder policies. But we’re clearly still a long way from anything approaching full open access, especially when you consider monographs, even though there is a broad consensus at the policy level that open access is both necessary and achievable. And there are different ideas about both the best course of action for increasing open access, and also about why it’s a good thing in the first place.