Full Schedule Now Available for Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism (10-11 April)

Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism

Date: 10 and 11 April 2025

Location: The Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library (UK), and online

Schedule: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/schedule/ 

The third installment of the Radical Open Access Conference focuses on the relationship between openness and activism, exploring what is next for radical forms of OA by addressing questions around publishing and social justice that those connected to the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) have been putting forward for years.

Join us for two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse and equitable future for open access. 

More details and registration: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/ (please note the separate registration for each day)

Speakers: Élisabeth Arsenault, Sarah-Anne Arsenault, Lucy Barnes, Simon Batterbury, Marc Herbst, Rupert Gatti, Angela Okune, Charmaine Pereira, Jeff Pooley, Ela Przybyło, Magalí Rabasa, Ash Sharma, Stevphen Shukaitis, Lauren Smith, Alessandra Tosi, Vincent van Gerven Oei

Journals and Presses: darkmatter, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), ÉSBC, Feminist Africa, Feral Feminisms, Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Radical Librarianship, mediastudies.press, Minor Compositions, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

Conference Concept

The first Radical Open Access Conference in 2015 started from the position of neoliberalism’s co-option of open access (OA) publishing as just another profitable business model and instead put forward a different radical and scholar-led vision for OA. This led to the formation of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals, and other OA projects with

‘a shared investment in taking back control over the means of knowledge production in order to rethink what publishing is and what it can be.’

Although a focus on more resilient and ethical scholar-led forms of OA publishing remains crucial in the ROAC, ten years later many connected to the original ROAC community have moved beyond openness and towards other goals, especially now that OA publishing is increasingly becoming the standard. In this context, the question is less about openness as such and more about openness for whom and at what cost. At the same time, radical OA projects and communities promoting alternative and experimental forms of publishing have converged with various digital activisms and social movements organising around intersectional feminist, post- hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. In these contexts, the social activities making up publishing have become a space for critical reflection on and intervention into persistent power asymmetries in academia and traditional divisions of labour in publishing. They also have been connected with broader concerns of ‘how to work and live together’ in a world marked by humanitarian and planetary emergencies (