Technology Justice Bookstand | Radical Open Access

by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Rebekka Kiesewetter

Based on the theme of this year’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) conference, the Post-Publishing research strand within the CPC have curated a selection of openly available publications from members of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) and have brought these together as part of a virtual conference bookstand, which allows conference participants to access further readings around the themes that the conference addresses. This bookstand is based on the model used previously for the ROAC Virtual Book stand: https://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/latest-publications/

In 2018, ScholarLed developed a collaborative bookstand to cross-promote the publications of the presses within the consortium, highlighting the ideals and values that sustain their projects: open access, not-for-profit and scholar-led publishing, experimentation, and an ethics of care. The aim of this bookstand (which has subsequently been adopted and adapted by the ROAC) is to advocate these forms of publishing within academic communities in order to showcase the existence of alternative models for open access publishing. ScholarLed and ROAC want to use this to make a public and political statement about how not-for-profit presses can start to collaborate through these kinds of projects.

Through this virtual bookstand we hope to offer an alternative to the promotion of publications at in-person events. Now that academic conferences are being increasingly held in a virtual or hybrid form, we have adapted the bookstand to function online, imagining a virtual book stand that enables the sharing of new publications with attendees across the globe. We’ve also taken care to include non-English language publications and publications from authors in the Global South to highlight the range of research that open access can enable.