Reflections on Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism – Radical Open Access Collective

"The first Radical Open Access Conference (2015) responded to the proliferation of corporate profit-centred approaches to open access (OA) publishing and put forward a radical, scholar-led, non-profit alternative. This conference ultimately paved the way for the formation of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), a community that, today, consists of around 80 not-for-profit presses, journals, and other open access projects promoting mutual support 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.’

Ten years later, Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism explored what is next for radical forms of open access (OA) publishing, moving beyond narrow discourses on openness toward social justice activism. The conference asked how the act of publishing itself – writing, editing, translating, reviewing, facilitating – might forge meaningful alliances with broader movements for social justice, critical care, anti-fascism, and planetary survival. Held on 10 and 11 April 2025 at the Milstein Room at Cambridge University Library, Radical OA III brought together a community of publishers, editors, librarians, and technologists across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries to discuss radical OA publishing as a site of collective experimentation, transformative critique of dominant academic and publishing structures, and mutual support across situated, social justice-oriented approaches. The hybrid conference was structured around three panels held across two afternoons."