CHAPTER 14 OPEN ACCESS AND THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD IN SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING from Egalitarian Dynamics: Liminality, and Victor Turner’s Contribution to the Understanding of Socio-historical Process on JSTOR

"In this chapter, I reflect on ... transformations in the open access movement and the question of how we got from there to here, namely from open access as a ‘bottom-up, community-driven model’ to one where the key driving forces seem to be ‘commercial, institutional and political interests’ (Schöpfel 2018: 57). At first glance, this is perhaps an odd topic for a book on ritual and, indeed, I am not interested in ritual per se. However, my inspiration is the broader theory of continuity and change that Turner develops as part of his work on liminality and communitas, and its implications for understanding contemporary scholarly publishing: the axis upon which academic systems of value rotate. In using Turner, my aim is not to extend his work in new conceptual or theoretical directions, but to illustrate the ongoing vitality of his ideas in understanding contemporary social movements – including academic ones, such as open access itself."