Towards a philosophy of academic publishing

"Increasingly, scholars embrace a theory of technological disruption to indicate fundamental changes in the system of the digital text with the rise of open access. This theory needs closer scrutiny for its technological determinism....However one views it, the rise of open access (OA) has created a host of opportunities to challenge traditional publishing models....The open access movement aims to recover control—to assert our rights and ownership as cre- ators—over the material products of our academic labour, and in that sense is politically radical....Open access (OA), as noted earlier, has caused ripples through the publishing system, affecting the distribution of academic knowledge. The OA movement has widened the gap, in some sense, increasing visibility for some scholarship while creating difficulties in covering the costs of disseminating other scholarship. The geographical distribution of journal knowledge has become directly linked to a privileged world and sidelined those who struggle....OA raises issues around scholarly effort, academic quality and who profits by academic labour. Yet, we suggest, OA creates several opportunities for innovation. One of these is to encourage collective projects, thus to minimise the cost to individuals of Gold OA. Yet, this may fly in the face of the individualistic performativity underpinning many national research performance assessment audit tools....OA, despite its appropriation by the publishing houses to further enrich themselves at the expense of scholarly labour, does represent a valiant effort to regain the IP rights of scholars to their own work...."