The Commons and Care | Humanities CORE

Author(s): Joe Deville, Samuel Moore, Tahani Nadim Editor(s): Samuel Moore, Post Office Press, Mattering Press Abstract: Several projects within the Radical Open Access Collective (including Mattering Press, Goldsmiths Press, the PPJ, and Capacious) frame the work they do around open access publishing as a form of care. Here publishing is understood as a complex, multi-agential, relational practice. In various ways, these projects are concerned with considering how to attend more closely to some of the key participants in the publishing process and the practical responsibilities this might entail. This is in marked opposition to those neoliberal variants of open access publishing that focus more on individual authorial brands and measurable quantifiable outputs. In challenging such models, publishers have sought to open up and render explicit the politics of scholarly communication. This has been by, for example, developing an ethos in which people are paid fairly for their labour, in particular those without a direct stake in the published works themselves, acknowledging and otherwise making explicit their contributions, and redirecting volunteer efforts away from commercial pro t-driven entities in favour of supporting more progressive not-for-pro t forms of publishing. Through these and other means, care is used as a way for open access publishers to both reflect on their own work and begin to counter the calculative logics that permeate academic publishing. A key promise that animates these endeavours is the potential for developing publishing practices that enrich not just the careers of individual scholars but also scholarly communities. The hope is that it might be possible to build new and more horizontal alliances between authors, reviewers, publishers, readers, and the usually invisible body skilled professionals and volunteers on which so many experiments in open access publishing depend.