Against capital – STUART LAWSON

"I’m an open access advocate, I believe it has the potential to create a more equitable way for producing and sharing knowledge. But I’m currently doing a PhD on open access policy specifically looking at the ways that open access has been co-opted as one more tool for the neoliberalisation of higher education. (I’ll define neoliberalism in a moment.) So the reason I’ve called this talk ‘Against capital’ is that to me, the core problems that we have within scholarly communication are not technical problems that can be ‘fixed’ by new technology; they are social problems, that exist because of the power imbalances that are inherent in capitalist modes of organisation. So any new ‘disruptive’ or ‘innovative’ tool or company that claims to provide a better way of helping researchers, but still works with the grain of capitalism, I think we should all be highly sceptical of...."