Gary Hall, the relentlessly curious and provocative thinker, academic, and publisher, posted a thoughtful Mastodon thread on my recent essay for Culture Machine on “Before Progress. On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing”—appearing in the “Publishing After Progress” issue edited by Rebekka Kiesewetter. From Hall’s thread:

I’ll just speak to some of the radical OA publishing projects I’m associated with: Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press, Radical Open Access Collective, COPIM … But my experience is that, to recast Pooley’s words in ‘Before Progress’, scaling small does believe a ‘viable alternative’ system to the extractivism of the oligopolists is possible (contrary to Richard Poynder’s impression of it), and so does have an aspect of utopianism.

Their scaling small aspect, being an ethico-political stance, is not indicative of a retreat from such a progressive political vision of something better: it is the political vision. It’s just that the emphasis on diversity means the politics of scaling small is better understood less in terms of universalism and perhaps more in terms of something like pluriveralism, in the sense of the anticapitalist, antiracist, antiheteropatriarchal politics of certain Latin American activists and theorists.

In my replies, I conceded Gary’s core point about how ‘scaling small’ is compatible with utopian thinking (and practice)—with some self-doubt about whether my qualified claim about a retreat-from-exhaustion about thinking and talking big in the radical OA world was right.

I have revised and updated my “Large Language Publishing” Upstream essay from January, in a just-published article in KULA:

The AI hype cycle has come for scholarly publishing. This essay argues that the industry’s feverishーif mostly aspirationalーembrace of artificial intelligence should be read as the latest installment of an ongoing campaign. Led by Elsevier, commercial publishers have, for about a decade, layered a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations. That business is to mine and process scholars’ works and behavior into prediction products, sold back to universities and research agencies. This article focuses on an offshoot of the big firms’ surveillance-publishing businesses: the post-ChatGPT imperative to profit from troves of proprietary “training data,” to make new AI products andーthe essay predictsーto license academic papers and scholars’ tracked behavior to big technology companies. The article points to the potential knowledge effects of AI models in academia: Products and models are poised to serve as knowledge arbitrators, by picking winners and losers according to what they make visible. I also cite potential knock-on effects, including incentives for publishers to roll back open access (OA) and new restrictions on researchers’ access to the open web. The article concludes with a call for a coordinated campaign of advocacy and consciousness-raising, paired with high-quality, in-depth studies of publisher data harvestingーbuilt on the premise that another scholarly-publishing world is possible. There are many good reasons to restore custody to the academy, the essay argues. The latest is to stop our work from fueling the publishers’ AI profits.

From the imitable Corey Doctorow, in a good, link-filled post on the scholarly publishing scam:

It’s been four years since MIT’s decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier

How are MIT’s academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher’s site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there’s interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT’s libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn’t much!

Doctorow overestimates the danger to Elsevier et al, especially since other big libraries—notably the UC system—capitulated. The MIT story may hint at a solution to the collective action problem, but until a trans-Atlantic coalition of prominent libraries follows suit, it’s just a noble experiment.

From the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) recently released Contracts in Publishing: A Toolkit for Authors and Publishers:

Academic and scientific publishing is mainly concerned with the production and distribution of works of scholarly research through journals, non-fiction books and online resources. There are fast-moving and complex developments and debates in academic publishing around OA and openeducational resources (OERs). OA refers to materials that are freely available for anyone to use in their existing form; they may not be revised, repurposed or redistributed without the permission of the rights holder. OER refers to teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain where users are allowed to use as is, repurpose or tailor the materials according to their teaching or learning needs. The material can be shared or altered without permission or attribution.

It’s one of only two passing mentions of OA, and it’s plain wrong on repurposing and distribution (for most licenses); the contrast to OER (including the “public domain” statement) is equally weird. WIPO is the world’s IP broker, so it’s not surprising that OA gets short, inaccurate shrift. One irony: the toolkit carries a CC BY 4.0 license itself, so anyone may remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, as long as it’s attributed.

A good piece from the AAUP’s Academe on the encroachment of corporate software (like so-called “learning management systems” (LMSs)):

While commercialization of data, including user-generated content and intellectual property, occurs behind the scenes unregulated, senior administrators who license and purchase such systems are often complicit in profit-driven contracts that heavily advantage corpo­rate vendors and force end users to agree to all terms in their entirety to use the service. For a student, not using the service would mean not enrolling in a given class, because use of these platforms is often com­pulsory. Indeed, at Rutgers, as at many colleges and universities, students and instructors are never asked to give consent for their data to be used in LMS plat­forms. The university does so for us, on our behalf, without making this evident or explicit to us.

The authors, all based at Rutgers, summarize a report they completed for their AAUP chapter—and link to a companion journal article.

Since the Academe piece was published: Canvas maker Instructure was acquired by private equity firm KKR for $5 billion.

From a short piece I recently published in the European media studies journal NECSUS:

The real question is political will. If the scholarly publishing system is hurtling toward open access, who will pay for it? There are two choices, in effect: authors or direct support for publishing. Hinging authorship on the ability to pay is a bald injustice. If we are committed to furnishing open access for readers and authors alike, we need to push for what is the only fair way forward: collective funding. Recent developments in Europe and Latin America furnish a glint of promise for an APC-free future. The big commercial publishers will, however, fight to retain their obscene OA profits. The choice of which path to take will, ultimately, fall to universities, scholars, and the public who fund both. In that respect mediastudies.press is a political statement. Together with its scholar-led peers, we hope to demonstrate, in miniature, that a different publishing world is possible.