Antagonize This! The Empty Signification of “Academy-Owned” Publishing in the Neoliberal University | punctum books

 by Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

In a 2023 opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing,”undefined Sarah Kember and Amy Brand formulate a variation of the “horseshoe theory,”undefined which argues that the far left and far right, rather than being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, are in fact closely aligned. With respect to open access (OA) publishing and what has supposedly gone wrong (its hyper-commercialization), they argue that, at one extreme, there are rapaciously capitalist mega-publishers milking authors and institutions by charging exorbitant fees for OA publications, while at the other extreme, we have a supposedly gullible “grass-roots and often scholar-led movement” that, despite its civic values and its investments in non-profit, community-led forms of public knowledge, “effectively endorsed” the “neoliberal framework” of the former. Kember and Brand believe this to be the case because OA advocates have become too “ideological,” espousing “a simplistic belief in openness at any cost” that corporate-conglomerate publishers have taken advantage of. In addition, they claim that questions “about academic freedom, widening inequality, the impact on smaller publishers, and the applicability of science-based policy for the arts, social sciences, and humanities have long been overlooked in conversations about open access.”

In her 2024 essay in Culture Machine, Kember goes further and writes that, “Open access is a form of accelerationism which demonstrates that it cannot function strategically, that it can be coercive in its alignment with technocratic power, but not interventional in the face of technocratic power.”undefined In Kember’s view, there is not enough “antagonism” in OA publishing, especially to various forms of neoliberal technocracy. As she states it, “The possibility of antagonism—the prerequisite for politics—is latent in the new scholarly publishing landscape consisting of new university and scholar-led presses,” but they ultimately do not make good on it because of their investments, again, in “openness at any cost.” In their jointly authored essay, Kember and Brand ultimately propose that the “undervalued middle ground of nonprofit or fair-profit university-press publishing, mission-aligned with the academy,” which Kember (Goldsmiths Press) and Brand (MIT Press) represent, would provide a sensible “middle ground” for “equitable access to knowledge” and thus these “are the publishers that universities should protect, invest in, and make deals with.”

To argue their point, Kember and Brand provide an oversimplified image of what is, in fact, a much more complex and longer history of OA, situating its supposedly single origin in the “self-archiving practices” of scientific communities in the 1990s (what we now call Green OA), which Kember and Brand link to a vaguely articulated “Californian Ideology” representing an unholy alliance between “Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism” and “the free spirit of hippie culture.” All digs at hippies and California aside, Kember and Brand present a history of OA that bypasses, among other signature movements and events, the history of the Situationist International, public knowledge infrastructures developed in Latin America, Indonesia, and Africa, and the scholarly communication practices of the former Eastern Bloc.undefined One could even make the case that early efforts to translate the Bible into English from the late 1300s through the 1600s were a proto-OA hacktivist movement, and that very case has been cogently argued in Kathleen Kennedy’s book Medieval Hackers.undefined There is no one history of OA, but, rather, there are multiple histories, none of them complete, none of them totalizing, as Kember and Brand’s essay would have us believe. Moreover, you will be hard pressed to find anyone in the non-profit OA sector who has argued for openness “at any cost” (what would that even look like? would death squads be involved?) and most in the landscape of non-profit OA publishing are more than well aware and highly critical of the neoliberal technocracy that has dominated academic publishing—long before OA became the norm, we might add.

Kember and Brand present their one-dimensional, Anglo-American caricature of the OA movement in order to position themselves as the better guardians of OA academic publishing against the scholar-led ideologues and malfeasant commercial behemoths that, as Brand states in another paywalled essay, jointly “undermined” the “academy-controlled framework” of scholarly communications.undefined The phrase “academy-controlled” here is significant, as is its corollary “academy-owned publishing,” which first appeared (as far as we can tell) in a 2017 blog post on “Red OA,” but it garnered a more widespread adoption roundabout 2019. We see this terminology as a way for university presses to dist