In this paper I want to examine how a group of ‘radical open access’ initiatives and organisations are currently, as part of their ongoing experiments with academic publishing and scholarly communication, reconfiguring what research is and how we can produce, disseminate and consume it. As I will outline more in detail in what follows, as part of their theoretical and practical interventions, these initiatives disrupt the concepts of intellectual property, moral ownership and copyright that underlie and frame the objects of academic publishing: namely books and their authors. In their publishing experiments they attempt to move beyond the book as object, research as a singular original endeavour, and knowledge as something that needs to be fixed down and contained in order to be shared, or better said, monetised. These radical open access presses intervene into these publishing practices and discourses in various ways but I will focus on two related aspects in specific for this paper:
18
Embed
openreflections.files.wordpress.com · Web viewCraig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement,
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
In this paper I want to examine how a group of ‘radical open access’ initiatives
and organisations are currently, as part of their ongoing experiments with
academic publishing and scholarly communication, reconfiguring what research
is and how we can produce, disseminate and consume it. As I will outline more
in detail in what follows, as part of their theoretical and practical interventions,
these initiatives disrupt the concepts of intellectual property, moral ownership
and copyright that underlie and frame the objects of academic publishing:
namely books and their authors. In their publishing experiments they attempt to
move beyond the book as object, research as a singular original endeavour, and
knowledge as something that needs to be fixed down and contained in order to
be shared, or better said, monetised. These radical open access presses intervene
into these publishing practices and discourses in various ways but I will focus
on two related aspects in specific for this paper:
First of all, I will focus on how they are exploring forms of relational and
distributed authorship based on an ethics of care and responsibility, and
secondly I will focus on how they are experimenting with processual and
versioned forms of research and publishing in an attempt to move beyond the
book as a fixed object and commodity.
Before I will discuss these visions and experiments more in detail, I will
however first highlight how the hegemonic model and narrative surrounding
copyright has both in the past and in the current moment categorised and fixed
down both scholars and their research into authors and book-based objects.
From there I will highlight, drawing on new materialists insights, how any
practical and material intervention into this model is simultaneously a discursive
intervention, and vice versa. In other words, these open-ended, experimental
academic writing practices function as material-discursive interventions into the
academic discourse on copyright by questioning and reperforming its
underlying premises.
One of the main critiques of the liberal humanist model of authorship
concerns how it privileges the author as the sole source and origin of creativity.
The argument has been made however, both from a historical perspective and in
relation to todays networked digital environment, that authorship, research and
creativity, are heavily distributed. Yet the authorship construct sees directly
connected to it, in a tightly knit assemblage, copyright and the scholarly work as
object. In this respect, the above criticism notwithstanding, in a liberal vision of
research as something that is proprietory, the typical unit remains either the
author or the work. This ‘solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’
as Foucault has qualified it, albeit challenged, still retains a privileged position.
As Mark Rose argues, authorship—as a relatively recent cultural formation—
can be directly connected to the commodification of writing and to
proprietorship. Even more it developed in tandem with the societal principle of
possessive individualism, in which individual property rights are protected by
the social order.
Although these humanist notions of authorship and copyright—including
the connotations of reputation, individual creativity, ownership, authority,
attribution, and originality they carry—seem to be an integral part of the
scholarly method, despite the fact that they are often critiqued, they are very
hard to overcome. Nonetheless, it is important to continue to challenge these
traditional concepts, discourses, institutions and practices of authorship within
academia.
First of all because these essentialised notions of authorship do not do credit to
the more collaborative, networked and posthuman authorial practices as they
exist currently and have existed in the past, in academia and beyond. Agency is
more complex and distributed than the highly individualist and humanist
narratives accompanying romantic notions of authorship argue for. In this
respect there is an ongoing clash between what Merton has identified as the
values of originality and communism in scholarship. Another reason to
challenge humanist concepts of authorship relates to the function currently
fulfilled by authors in the academic political economy. In an effort to gain
reputation and authority in a scholarly attention economy, academics are
increasingly depicted as being in constant competition with each other (for
positions, impact, funding etc.), where scholars are still rewarded mostly on the
basis of their publication track record, and on their reputation as individual
authors. Academic authors are on the one hand turned into commodities, while
on the other they increasingly need to act as entrepreneurs and marketeers of
their own ‘brand’. This objectification of authorship at a time when ‘unoriginal’
thought, depicted as plagiarism, is heavily combatted and frowned upon, goes
against some of the more distributive and collaborative notions, practices and
discourses of authorship. Yet the latter can be seen to not only be just as
prevalent in contemporary academia, but in many ways a more realistic
depiction of scholarly authorial practices.
Some of the more interesting recent critiques of these constructs of
authorship and proprietorship have come from critical and feminist legal
studies, where scholars such as Carys Craig have started to question these
connections further. As Craig, Turcotte and Coombe point out, copyright,
authorship, the work as object and related discourses around creativity,
continuously re-establish and strengthen each other as part of a self-sustaining
system. We see this with the discourse around creative industries, as part of
which economic value comes to stand in for the creative process itself, which,
according to this narrative, can only be sustained through an IP regime.
Furthermore, from a feminist new materialist position, the current discourse on
authorship is very much a material expression of authorship rather than merely
its representation, where this discourse has been classifying, constructing, and
situating authorship within a neoliberal framework.
Historically there has been a great shift form a valuing of imitation or
derivation to a valuing of originality where it concerns our discourses of what
counts as research or research output. Similar to Rose, Craig, Turcotte and
Coombe argue that the individuality and originality of authorship in its modern
form (established in the 18th century) established a simple route towards
individual ownership and the propertization of creative achievement: the
original work is the author’s ownership whereas the imitator or pirate is a
trespasser of thief. In this sense original authorship is ‘disproportionately valued
against other forms of cultural expression and creative play’, where copyright
upholds, maintains and strengthens the binary between imitator and creator,
which Craig, Turcotte and Coombe define as a ‘moral divide’.
This also presupposes a notion of writing and research that sees authors as
autonomous, living in isolation from each other, ignoring their relationality. Yet
as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, ‘the act of writing involves not
origination, but rather the adaptation, derivation, translation and recombination
of "raw material" taken from previously existing texts’. This position has been
explored extensively from within remix studies and fan culture, where the
adaptation and remixing of cultural content stands at the basis of creativity
(what Lawrence Lessig has called Read/Write culture, opposed to Read/Only
culture). From the perspective of access to culture (instead of ownership of
cultural goods) one could also argue that its value would increase when we are
able to freely distribute it and with that to adapt and remix it to create new
cultural content and with that cultural and social value.
To move beyond Enlightenment ideals of individuation and unity of
author and work, which determine the author-owner in the copyright model,
Craig puts forward a post-structuralist vision of relational authorship. This sees
the individual as socially situated and constituted—based also on feminist
scholarship into the socially situated self—where authorship in this vision is
situated within the communities in which it exists, but also in relationship to the
text and discourses that constitute it. Here creativity takes place from within a
network of social relations and the social dimensions of authorship are
recognized, as connectivity goes hand in hand with individual autonomy. In this
respect Craig argues that copyright should not be defined out of clashing rights
and interests but should instead focus on the kind of relationships this right
would structure, it should be understood in relational terms: ‘it structures
relationships between authors and users, allocating powers and responsibilities
amongst members of cultural communities, and establishing the rules of
communication and exchange’.
Craig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational
authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement, where, as
they state, ‘rather than adhering to the individuated form of authorship that
intellectual property laws presuppose, open access initiatives take into account
varying forms of collaboration, creativity and development’. Yet as scholars
such as Gary Hall, Sarah Kember, myself and others have argued, open access
or open access publishing is not a solid ideological block or model, where it is
made up of disparate groups, visions and ethics. In this sense there is nothing
intrinsically political or democratic about open access. Practitioners of open
access can just as well be seen to support and encourage open access in
connection with the neoliberal knowledge economy, with possessive
individualism and with the unity of author and work.
Nevertheless, there are those within the loosely defined and connected
‘radical open access community’, that do envision their publishing outlook and
relationship towards copyright, openness and authorship within and as part of a
relational ethics of care. Mostly academic-led and centred, this community
experiments with making research available in open access, with new formats
such as liquid monographs, wiki-publications and remixed books, and with the
establishment of new, alternative institutions and practices. They try to
challenge and reconceptualise scholarly communication, whilst experimenting
with and rethinking openness itself. This approach towards openness, exploring
new formats and stimulating sharing and re-use of content, can be seen as a
potentially radical alternative to and a critique of the business ethics underlying
innovations in the knowledge economy whilst at the same time creating strong
alternatives that try to break down the commercial object-formation that has
encompassed the scholarly book, among others by envisioning open access as
an ongoing critical project.
The term radical open access was first introduced by Gary Hall at a talk at
Columbia University, entitled ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ in 2010
and in 2015 the Radical Open Access Conference took place at Coventry
University which brought together a large array of presses and publishing
initiatives (often academic-led) in support of an ‘alternative’ vision of open
access and scholarly communication. Participants of this conference
subsequently formed the loosely allied Radical Open Access collective.
Mattering Press, one of the initiatives that took part in the conference, is a
scholar-led open access book publishing initiative founded in 2012 and
launched in 2016 that publishes in the field of Science and Technology Studies.
Mattering Press works with a production model based on cooperation and
shared scholarship. As part of its publishing politics, ethos and ideology, they
are therefore keen to include various agencies involved in the production of
scholarship, including ‘authors, reviewers, editors, copy editors, proof readers,
typesetters, distributers, designers, web developers and readers’.
They work with two interrelated feminist (new materialist) and STS concepts to
structure and perform this ethos: mattering (Barad 2007) and care (Mol 2008).
Where it concerns mattering, Mattering Press is conscious of how their
experiment in knowledge production, being inherently situated, puts new
relationships and configurations into the world.
What therefore matters for them are not so much the ‘author’ or the ‘outcome’
(the object), but the process and the relationships that make up publishing. For
Mattering Press care is something that extends not only to authors but to the
many other actants involved in knowledge production, who often provide free
volunteer labour within a gift economy context.
As Mattering Press emphasises, the ethics of care ‘mark vital relations and
practices whose value cannot be calculated and thus often goes unacknowledged
where logics of calculation are dominant’. For them care can help offset and
engage with the calculative logic that permeates academic publishing. This
logic of care refers among others to making visible the ‘unseen others’ as Joe
Deville (one of Mattering Press’s editors) calls them, who exemplify the
plethora of hidden labour which goes unnoticed within this object and author-
focused (academic) publishing model. As Endre Danyi, another Mattering Press
editor, remarks, quoting Susan Leigh Star: ‘This is, in the end, a profoundly
political process, since so many forms of social control rely on the erasure or
silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations of the
work’.
The above described more relational notion of rights and the wider
appreciation of the various (posthuman) agencies involved in academic
publishing and communication, based on an ethics of care, challenges the vision
of the single individualised and original author/owner who stands at the basis of
our copyright and IP regime. The other side of the Foucauldian double bind, the
fixed cultural object that functions as a commodity, has however been similarly
critiqued from several angles. As stated before, currently our copyright and
remuneration regime is based on ownership of cultural objects. Yet as many
have already made clear, this regime and discourse is very much based on
physical objects and on a print-based situation. As such the idea of ‘text’ has not
been sufficiently problematised as versioned, processual and materially
changing within an IP context. In other words, text and works are mostly
perceived as fixed and stable objects and commodities instead of material and
creative processes and entangled relationalities. In opposition to a more
relational perspective, the current copyright regime views culture through a
proprietary lens. And it is very much this discursive positioning, or as Craig et
al. argue ‘the language of "ownership," "property," and "commodity"’, which
‘obfuscates the nature of copyright's subject matter, and cloaks the social and
cultural conditions of its production and the implications of its protection’. How
can we approach research in context, as socially and culturally situated, and not
as the free-standing, stable product of a transcendent author, which is very much
how it is being positioned within an economic and copyright framework? This
hegemonic conception of research as property fails to acknowledge or take into
consideration the manifold, distributed, derivative and messy realities of
research and culture.
Published on an open-source wiki platform, Living Books about Life is a series
of open access books about life published by Open Humanities Press, an
international open access publishing initiative in the humanities, specializing in
critical and cultural theory, also a member or the radical open access collective.
All the books in this series repackage existing open access science-related
research, supplementing this with an original editorial essay to tie the collection
together. They also provide additional multimedia material, from videos to
podcasts to whole books. With this series Open Humanities Press wants to
highlight that authorship is collaborative and even often anonymous, where with
the publishing of research in wikis they aim to further complicate the focus on a
static marketable book object within academia
Being published online on a wiki platform means that the books are ‘open on a
read/write basis for users to help compose, edit, annotate, translate and remix’.
As Gary Hall, one of the initiators of the project has argued, this project
amongst others wants to challenge the physical and conceptual limitations of the
traditional codex by emphasizing its duration by publishing in a wiki and thus
‘rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavor’. Hall argues
that wikis offer a potential to question and critically engage issues of
authorship, work and stability. They can offer increased accessibility and induce
participation from contributors from the periphery. As he states, ‘wiki-
communication can enable us to produce a multiplicitous academic and
publishing network, one with a far more complex, fluid, antagonistic,
distributed, and decentred structure, with a variety of singular and plural, human
and non-human actants and agents’.
Our scholarly publishing and communication practices currently function within
an object-based neoliberal capitalist system: a system that is fed and sustained
by the idea of autonomous ownership of a work, copyright (mostly going to
publishers), and a reputation economy based on individualised authors. In this
respect, an exploration of more distributed and collaborative notions of
authorship, as well as of forms of anti-authorship critique, might help us take
attention away from the scholarly work as a product and the book as an
academic commodity. This might potentially stimulate re-use and more
processual forms of research. Similarly, it might promote a move towards
envisioning the production of research as a process in which a variety of actants
play a role, both in the production, dissemination and consumption of that
research. To some extent both Craig’s relational model and the model proposed
by for example legal scholar Johanna Gibson, who wants to adapt and expand
copyright by focusing on more networked notions of creativity, are reformist
and responsive where it concerns copyright, seeking to expand this concept and
making it more inclusive. Here copyright still comes first. What is interesting
about these radical open access experiments is that their focus is first and
foremost on the relationalities of publishing, on our practices as researchers,
reconfiguring these based on an ethics of care, a continued questioning of
established institutions and an openness to change and becoming. These notions
are central and challenge any copyrights model which remains inexcruciably
tied up with ownership and authorship of a research object and with the
commodification and corporatisation of knowledge, research and thought.