On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing

"In his late-2023 announcement that the open access (OA) movement has ‘failed’, journalist Richard Poynder cited a number of reasons for giving up on OA. One sign of failure, he wrote, is ‘unrealistic expectations about diamond open access and the possibility of the research community “taking back ownership” of scholarly communication’. Good luck with that, he implied. At the same time, Poynder criticized the radical open access community for, in effect, going its own way: its ‘scaling small’ alternative is doomed for niche irrelevance and, as a result, ‘offers little hope of the kind of systemic change that OA would need to succeed’ (Poynder, 2023: 1–2). Poynder, a leading observer of the OA scene for two decades, has a point. There is little short-run prospect for the restoration of academic custody over scholarly publishing, on the large scale he has in mind. It’s true, too, that the ‘scaling small’ radical-OA alternative (Adema & Moore, 2021) is, by its own admission, operating on the margins of the commercial system.

Still, I think Poynder is wrong in an important sense, or at least that he is unwise. His defeatism is self-crippling, since his claims may help bring about the conditions they purport to merely describe. This essay is a counterpoint—a brief for utopian thinking in scholarly publishing. I argue against a species of resigned realism that concedes too much to present conditions. It is important, contra Poynder (2023: 2), to maintain ‘unrealistic expectations’. Whether or not another (scholarly publishing) world is possible, it is important to act as if it is. In both the short and medium runs, the way we talk about scholarly communication helps dictate the aperture of imaginative possibility...."