5.1 Introduction

In the struggle for the future of the book and the university, access to scholarship has become an increasingly important issue, one that is standing at the basis of new knowledge practices. Many scholars however feel that access to specialised research, especially in the humanities, has diminished due to shrinking library budgets on the one hand and more trade focused scholarly presses and publishers on the other. As the previous chapter showed, due to the rise of economic ideologies and market forces in both academia and scholarly book publishing over the last few decades, the monograph as a specific publishing and communication format has increasingly developed according to market demands. In this chapter I want to explore two related efforts that might potentially offer an opportunity to intervene in the current cultures of knowledge production in academia and publishing. To do so, and as I proposed in my introduction to this section, I want to focus on the two remaining aspects of the strategy I am laying out towards re-cutting the object-formation of the book. In chapter 4 I explored the first step of this strategy, offering a potential way to reframe the discourse surrounding the past and future of the book; here I will examine the two further steps, namely rethinking and re-performing the institutions surrounding the material production of the book, as well as our own entangled scholarly communication and publishing practices.

            As part of my effort to investigate potential alternatives, I will begin this chapter with a focus on some of the people and projects that are exploring (radical forms of) open scholarship and open access. Then, in the next part of this chapter, I will concentrate on research and publishing efforts that are investigating experimentation as a specific discourse and practice of critique, specifically with respect to the current system of scholarly object-formation (and opposed to narratives of innovation). Finally, I will conclude by arguing that, in order to sustain these affirmative critiques of the object-formation of the scholarly monograph and scholarly research more in general, we need forms of radical open access that include experimentation.

5.2 Openness and Open Access Publishing

Open access publishing can be seen as one of the most important recent developments in digital scholarly publishing. David Prosser, the director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) even goes so far as to call it ‘the next information revolution’ (2003), and both the UK and the EU have made headway with mandating open access for publicly funded research. Open access has also been important for book publishing, and, more specifically, for the struggle over the future of the book. I will therefore begin with an analysis of the relationship between open access and scholarly book publishing, and the motives behind the latter’s interest in and uptake of open access. As part of that I will examine some of the forms a politics of the book based on openness might take, where a politics of the book is concerned with exploring how we can criticise and potentially start to change the cultures of material and technological production that surround scholarly communication in such a way as to allow for alternative, more ethical, critical and responsible forms of research. We can do this, I argue, by rethinking and deconstructing the object-formation of scholarship, both as part of academia’s impact and audit culture, and as part of the publishing market’s focus on commercially profitable book-commodities. This can be achieved, not by ignoring the fact that the book is and needs to be cut at some point in time (and thus cannot only be a processual and never-ending project), but by focusing on what other boundaries we might emphasise and take responsibility for. How might these aid us in critiquing the ongoing capitalisation of research—which comes to the fore in the increasing need for measurement, innovation and transparency, for instance?

To examine such a politics of the book based on openness, I will begin by looking at some of the critiques that have been put forward with respect to the concept of openness, and open politics more specifically. Where initially the open access and open source movements where heralded by progressive thinkers as part of a critique of the commodification of knowledge (Berry 2008: 39), openness is seen increasingly as a concept and practice that connects well with neoliberal needs and rhetoric, and that can be related to ideas of transparency and efficiency promoted by business and government.[1] From an initially subversive idea,[2] one can argue that open access, partly related to its growing accessibility and wider general uptake, is increasingly co-opted by capitalist ideology (of which the Finch Report, which we will be discussing later, is ample evidence) and as a result is turning in some respects at least into yet another business model for commercial publishers to reap a profit from.

To present another context to this debate and to open up and struggle for an alternative future for the already diverse and contingent idea of openness, I will be critically engaging with the work of media scholar Nathaniel Tkacz. Tkacz has written an important article on openness in which he pinpoints what he considers to be some of the inconsistencies in the concept of openness and open politics, and how from its very inception it can be connected to neoliberal thought. He achieves this, both by going back to the ‘father of open thought’, Karl Popper, and by analysing the influence of open software cultures on current open movements. Tkacz’s article can be seen as an illustrative example of the kind of thinking that criticises the liberatory tendencies and idealism present in many openness advocacies, and that sees openness as related to neoliberalism—a way of thinking that is no less fuelled by the recent uptake of open access by government and commercial publishing.

However, as part of my exploration of an open politics of the book, I want to offer an alternative genealogy of openness: one that is closely connected to the history of the book and of scholarly knowledge production, as discussed in the previous chapter; but also one that supplements Tkacz’s analysis, which focuses mostly on openness’s genealogy in the thought of Popper and the open source movement, and on the prevalence of an open-closed dichotomy. My alternative genealogy forges a stronger connection between the ideal of openness and the development of scholarly communication and open access publishing, while simultaneously seeing openness as intrinsically implicated in practices of secrecy and closure. This will then serve as impetus to explore in further detail the diversity of current engagements with openness and open access (beyond a focus on its neoliberal usurpation) by analysing some of the different value systems, motivations and politics underlying its uptake. The emphasis I am placing here on the sheer variety that makes up the ‘schools of thought’ on openness and open access, also serves to counter the vision that open access is intrinsically connected to neoliberalist discourses and practices, and enables me to argue instead that it can, at least potentially, be used as a powerful critique of these systems. To illustrate this diversity of uptake I will contrast the neoliberal vision of open access publishing as envisioned in the Finch Report[3] with what could be called radical open access publishing, drawing on some recent experiments that try to challenge and rethink the book as a commercial object, as well as the political economy surrounding it, by cutting the book together and apart differently.[4] I will conclude my discussion of open access with an exploration of what an open politics of the book could then potentially be, the latter being a politics that has its base in forms of open-ended experimentation, but which at the same time remains aware of, and takes responsibility for, the boundaries that still need to be enacted.

5.2.1 Reasons and Motivations Behind Open Access

What, then, were the main reasons behind the uptake of open access, especially in scholarly book publishing? How was it envisioned as a potential strategy against excessive forms of commercial publishing and academic capitalism? The open access movement[5] can be seen as a direct reaction against the ongoing commercialisation of research and of the publishing industry, coupled to a felt need to make research more widely accessible in a faster and more efficient way. Open access literature has been defined as ‘digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions’.[6] The movement grew out of an initiative established by academic researchers, librarians, managers and administrators, who argued that the current publishing system was no longer able or willing to fulfil their communication needs, even though opportunities were now increasingly offered by new digital distribution formats and mechanisms to make research more widely accessible. From the early 1990s onwards, open access was initiated and developed within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, where it focused mainly on the author self-archiving research works in central, subject or institutionally-based repositories (Green OA). These can be works that have been submitted for peer review (preprints), or that are final peer-reviewed versions (postprints). The other main and complementary route to open access focused on the publishing of research works in open access journals, books or other types of literature (Gold OA) (Harnad et al. 2004: 310–314, Guédon 2004). In the humanities and social sciences (HSS), the fields where books have tended to be the preferred communication medium, open access caught on later than in the STEM fields. This was due, among other reasons, to: the slow rise of book digitisation and of ebook uptake by scholars; the focus on green open access within the STEM fields, targeting the high costs of subscriptions to journals in these fields, whereas journals in the HSS are generally cheaper; the specific difficulty with copyright and licensing agreements for books; and the expenses involved in publishing books in comparison with articles (i.e. they have different publishing and business models).[7]

            Open access also filled another void in the HSS, where it was perceived as the answer to the monograph crisis. As described in chapter 4, scholarly monograph publishing is seen to be facing a crisis, where its already feeble sustainability is being endangered by continually declining book sales.[8] Library spending on ebooks has gone down, due to acquisition budgets cuts and decisions to buy journals in STEM instead, which have seen rising subscription costs (Thompson 2005). This drop in library demand for HSS monographs has led university presses to produce smaller print runs and focus on marketable titles. This has been threatening the availability of specialised humanities research and has led to related problems for—mostly early-career—scholars, where career development within the humanities is directly coupled to the publishing of a monograph by a reputable press (Darnton 1999). Partly in response to this perceived monograph crisis, these developments have seen the rise of a number of scholarly-, library- and/or university-press initiatives that are experimenting more directly with making monographs available on an open access basis. These initiatives include scholar-led presses such as Open Humanities Press, re.press, and Open Book Publishers; cooperatives of university presses such as OAPEN and Open Edition; commercial presses such as Bloomsbury Academic; university presses, including ANU E Press and Firenze University Press; and presses established by or working with libraries, such as Athabasca University’s AU Press and Göttingen University Press. As Sigi Jöttkandt and Gary Hall argue with respect to the decision to set up Open Humanities Press in relation to the monograph crisis:

Such a situation not only affects the careers and, potentially, the choice of research areas of individuals. It also impacts the humanities itself – both because a lot of excellent work is unable to find appropriate publication outlets and also because decisions concerning the production, publication, dissemination and promotion of humanities research are being made less and less by universities and academics on intellectual grounds, and more and more by scholarly and commercial presses on economic grounds. When ground-breaking research that develops new insights is rejected in favour of more marketable introductions and readers, it is clear that academia as a whole becomes ‘intellectually impoverished’. (2007)

However, as is already indicated by the variety of initiatives and the diversity of their backgrounds, the motivations behind the development of open access archiving and publishing are extremely diverse. They include the desire to: increase accessibility to specialised humanities research by making it online and openly available (to enable increased readership and to promote the impact of scholarly research, next to enabling heightened accessibility to research to those in developing countries, for instance);[9] to publish or disseminate research in an open way in order to take social responsibility and to enhance a democratic public sphere as a means of stimulating a liberal democracy that thrives on an informed public; to argue for the importance of sharing research results in a more immediate and direct way; and to offer an alternative to, and to stand up against, the large, established, profit-led, commercial publishing houses that have come to dominate the field in order to liberate ideas and thinkers from market constraints and to be able to publish specialist scholarship that lacks a clear commercial market.

            However, these liberal-democratic motives for open access exist side-by side, not just with more radical and critical motives, but also with the neoliberal rhetoric of the knowledge-economy. In the latter, open access is seen as supporting a competitive economy by making the flow of information more flexible, efficient, transparent and cost-effective, and by making research more accessible to more people. This makes it easy for knowledge, as a form of capital, to be taken up by businesses for commercial re-use, stimulating economic competition and innovation. In this way the research process, its results and their dissemination, can be efficiently monitored and measured and can be better made accountable as measurable outputs (Hall 2008a, Houghton et al. 2009, Adema 2010). This will make it easier for business and industry to capitalise on academic knowledge and it will stimulate global competition.

5.2.2 The Potentials and Pitfalls of Open’s ‘Openness’

As Hall has argued in Digitize this book!, where he gives a very detailed and comprehensive overview of the differing but often also overlapping motivations that exist concerning open access and openness, there is nothing intrinsically political or democratic about open access. Motives that focus on democratic principles often go hand in hand with neoliberal arguments concerning the benefits of open access for the knowledge economy. The politics of the book in relationship to open access publishing is thus not predefined, nor is it my intention to argue that it should be.[10] Openness in many ways can be seen as what Laclau calls a floating signifier (2005: 129–155), a concept without a fixed meaning and one that is easily adopted by different political ideologies. As I will point out, it is this very openness and lack of fixity of the concept that gives it its power, but also brings with it a risk of uncertainty towards its (future) adoption. However, for some scholars it is exactly this ‘openness’ of open access or of the concept of openness that is problematic. Before we can explore in more depth what openness or an open politics could potentially enable in the form of experimental and critical scholarly practices, we therefore need to focus on some of the criticisms that have been made of this controversial and unsettled idea of openness. Recently, a lot of this critique has focused on the ease with which open access, as a concept and practice, can be applied in a variety of political contexts—most noticeably as part of a neoliberal rhetoric and profitable commercial business models (Tkacz 2012, Eve, M. 2013, Holmwood 2013a). As I mentioned previously, media scholar Nate Tkacz is one of the thinkers who has critiqued the concept of openness extensively from this angle, and it will thus be useful to explore his analysis here more in detail.

Tkacz’s assessment of openness in his article ‘From Open Source to Open Government: a Critique of Open Politics’, is based on what he sees as ‘a critical flaw in how openness functions in relation to politics’ (2012: 386). Tkacz explores ‘the recent proliferation of openness as a political concept’—where it has become, as he states, ‘a master category of contemporary political thought’ (2012: 386–387)—through a detailed reading of the work of Karl Popper on openness and the open society, while further tracing its recent genealogy through software and network cultures. His critique focuses mainly on how openness and open politics, both in Popper and in contemporary incarnations of open politics, serves as an inscrutable political ideal, merely opposed to its empty binary, the closed society, or closed politics, which is a politics based on centralised governance (critiqued by neoliberalists such as Friedrich Hayek) and/or unchallengeable truths (such as Popper argues one can find in the politics of fascism and communism).

Tkacz is interested in how this concept and ‘empty ideal’ of openness has recently re-emerged in politics, and how it has been re-politicised, based on its connections with software cultures. He explores how openness has been translated into new domains, such as open access, in entities such as Wikipedia and Google, and in a variety of government initiatives, as a practical application of open-source politics. His examination leads Tkacz to conclude that ‘the same rhetoric [of openness] is deployed by what are otherwise very different groups or organisations’ (2012: 393). Openness shows certain consistencies throughout these cultures, Tkacz argues, such as in ‘its couplings with transparency, collaboration, competition and participation, and its close ties with various enactments of liberalism’ (2012: 399). These can also be seen to underpin our current neoliberal governmentality.[11] The mobilisation of openness in the politics of ‘activist and marginal network cultures’ (2012: 395), as well as in more mainstream organisations, urges Tkacz to coin a critique of the open, arguing that there are some crucial problems with the concept and that it has a poverty that ‘makes it unsuitable for political description’ (2012: 399).

            As noted above, Tkacz relates these problems to a genealogy of openness connected to the thought of Popper and the politics and political economy of software and network cultures. For Tkacz, Popper is the father of open thought, who sketches an overall theory of the open versus closed society. Tkacz sees the thought of both Popper and Hayek (one of the fathers of neoliberal thought) as highly influential with respect to the current politics of openness. He analyses the recent proliferation of openness in open movements ‘largely as a reaction to a set of undesirable developments, beginning with the realm of closed systems and intellectual property and its “closed source’’’ (Tkacz 2012: 403). Here he sketches a conceptualisation of openness that is similar to the binary already proposed by Popper.

            In his critique of openness, Tkacz thus focuses mainly on Popper and on how the binary open-closed cannot be upheld, since closure is inherent in Popper’s notion of openness. Tkacz states that, based on the philosophy of Popper, the open as a concept is reactionary (where it merely states what it is not, i.e. not closed), it has no (true, positive) meaning—which would close it off—and cannot ‘build a lasting affirmative dimension’ (2012: 400). He further argues that if there are positive qualities to openness, they exist at the level of reality (of real practices) and are therefore subject to continual transformation, which Tkacz sees as paradoxical: how can something that is already open, then become more open, when this means that it thus must have not been open before? For Tkacz, then, clearly ‘Openness (…) implies antagonism, or what the language of openness would describe as closures’ (2012: 403). He argues, however, that these closures get obscured in current incarnations of open politics. The way the open is used in a forward looking and almost prophetic way in many open movements (towards ‘more openness’) has made these simultaneous closures invisible, which mainly has to do with the lack of critique of the open in these movements. For Tkacz’s argues that there has been little reflection on the concept of openness, especially with respect to ‘how seemingly radically different groups can all claim it as their own.’ From this Tkacz concludes that ‘openness, it seems, is beyond disagreement and beyond scrutiny’, and elsewhere, ‘whose meaning is so overwhelmingly positive it seems impossible to question, let alone critique’ (2012: 386, 399).

            In response to Tkacz’s analysis that openness is ‘beyond disagreement’ and ‘impossible to question’, I would like to argue that an extensive critique of openness does exist (including his own work on the topic), and has been formulated, also from within open movements.[12] Furthermore, I would also like to offer an alternative to Tkacz’s genealogy of openness—and with that to open access and open politics. I want to do so to offer a supplement to his genealogy based on the thought of Popper and the politics of software and network cultures, but also in an attempt to offer a genealogy that does not rely so strongly on the open-closed binary. For the genealogy of openness that Tkacz traces is a very specific one; one that relates to what Hall has called ‘the liberal, democratising approach’ to openness (2008a: 197). An alternative genealogy that tries to re-asses the binary open-closed and that can be traced back to the early developments of scholarly publishing, influencing current incarnations of open access, might therefore be beneficial here. It might be so, not only with regard to rethinking some of the problems Tkacz describes relating to the concept of openness, but also to casting a more favourable, affirmative light on the potential of openness and of forms of what can be called radical open access.

            Tkacz’s problem with the concept of openness, in my opinion, relates mostly to the concept of openness as developed and used by Popper (notwithstanding the influence this has had on the political reincarnation of openness). It isn’t the concept itself, in all its uses—as Tkacz describes it (2012: 399)—that has crucial problems, but the specific concept of openness developed and used by Popper. It is this concept that is based on a binary between open and closed; and that has been further developed through the thought of Hayek and network and software cultures, following a forward-looking (neo)liberal/democratic approach to openness. In this respect, Tkacz has traced the genealogy of a specific approach to openness, one that makes it easy to connect openness to neoliberalism and capitalist democracies, as well as to a teleological conception of openness as a form of looking forward, focused on being more open (in the sense of being less closed).

However, I would like to draw attention to other forms and cultures of openness that do not connect so strictly to this binary, but rather envision openness and closure as enmeshed, similarly to the argument Tkacz makes when he states that openness inevitably includes closures. Tkacz regards these closures in openness as something inherent in openness, but then following the binary conception of openness in the thought of Popper, decides to see this as problematic and paradoxical for the concept of openness, instead of developing this further and envisioning this as a potential core strength of ideas of the open and open politics. As he states: ‘closure remains an inherent part of the open; it is what openness must continually respond to and work against – a continual threat amongst the ranks’ (Tkacz 2012: 403). However, building further on what Tkacz states about openness implying antagonisms, I would argue that these antagonisms, these closures, are exactly what we need (and have always had) as part of an open politics, and what give it its strength.

I would thus like to propose a genealogy of openness in which openness is integrally connected to and entangled with a different ‘antagonist’, namely, secrecy. Interestingly, in this genealogy, openness as a concept is directly related to the historical development of systems and discourses of knowledge production and communication. Scholarly research on openness in scientific communication can be seen to be far more ambivalent and contextual in its coverage of the concept of openness than Popper is, for instance ( Long 2001, David 2008, Vermeir and Margócsy 2012, Vermeir 2012). By offering both a contrasting and a supplementary genealogy of openness, I would like to shed a more positive light on the potential of openness, both as a concept and as a practice and politics, to critique the ongoing marketisation of knowledge.

Extending from that, and in response to Tkacz’s prompt to explore open projects more closely,[13] I would like to take a more contextualised look at some specific open access projects at the end of this section. There I will argue that if we analyse specific instances of how openness is practised and theorised, we will see that open access is not one thing, that its meaning is highly disputed, that it is (or can be) implemented in different ways and that this leads to different and often contrasting politics. For neither the same rhetoric nor the same underlying motivations for openness are shared by the different groups of people involved in open access practices, where these groups theorise openness in (often highly) different ways, and according to different underlying value systems.[14] This includes practices and theories of radical open access that are critical of openness in its neoliberal/democratic guises, but still try to engage with the open in an affirmative way too. The latter are projects that don’t necessarily adhere to a teleological vision of openness (towards the goal of more openness, whatever that would be), but argue instead that openness is not about being more open, for instance, but is rather about being open to change and experimentation—depending on the contingent circumstances, the political and ethical decisions and cuts that need to be made and so on—in a process of continual critique, without necessarily being forward looking in a teleological sense. In our ongoing affirmative politics and practices of the open we make cuts and close down the open; however, as I will argue, we can start to think more responsibly and ethically about the closures we enact and enable in our communication practices: for instance, by focussing on creating difference as part of the incisions (closures) we make, and by promoting otherness, variety and processual becoming. Instead of shying away from these closures, these boundaries that are already implied in openness, might a more interesting approach not be to explore how these decisions are made, by whom, and how we can re-cut them in different ways? And might it not be more interesting to do so especially with respect to how we currently publish our scholarly books?

I will thus explore an alternative and complimentary genealogy of openness to that offered by Tkacz next—one that fits better, I will argue, with the specific, contextual politics of open access and radical open access publishing, and that does indeed see openness and secrecy/closure not as binaries but as integrally enmeshed. After the examination of that alternative genealogy, I will provide an account of some of the different ways in which openness and open access have been and are being theorised and practised, by comparing the neoliberal analysis of open access the Finch report offers, with the practices and critique of radical open access publishing. I will do so to emphasise the contingency and contextuality of openness, but also to bring attention to more radical and critical incarnations of open access and openness, which focus on a critique of the business ethics underlying neoliberal politics, among other things.

5.2.2.1 A Genealogy of Openness and Secrecy

In her book Openness, Secrecy, Authorship (2001), the historian Pamela Long provides a genealogy of openness that is closely connected to the development of specific cultures of knowledge, and the way these have categorised and conceptualised knowledge. She shows how openness advanced in connection to ideas and practices of secrecy, authorship, and property rights, and alongside the establishment of print and the printed scholarly book in the West (although her exploration of openness, secrecy, authorship and the technical arts stretches back to developments in antiquity). Long looks at the influence and development of craft and practice-based or mechanical knowledge, alongside traditions of theoretical knowledge, and their mutual influence and interaction with respect to the construction of the discourse surrounding knowledge over the centuries, including its relationship to openness and secrecy. Where initially in antiquity Aristotelian science made strict divisions between têchne (material and technical production), praxis (action) and episteme (theoretical knowledge), Long argues that it was the direct links and closer interaction between the mechanical arts (craft knowledge), political power, and theoretical knowledge (or learned traditions), which led to the development of empirical and experimental scientific methodologies in the 17^th century, including an expansion of scientific authorship into practices of ‘openly purveyed treatises’ (2001: 102).

            As Long points out, it was the new alliance between power (praxis) and the technical arts (têchne) that initially enabled authorship in these fields to expand in an effort to legitimate and promote those in political power. New city-based rulers wanted to emphasise their legitimacy, and did so through, among other things, grand urban redesigns and other construction projects. Books on the mechanical arts thus became a worthy subject from the 15^th and 16^th century onwards, where many of these volumes emerged from a patronage system, produced to enhance the status of the patron. However, they also served to enhance the status of mechanical and craft knowledge, for one important aspect of openness, as Long states, was the accurate or proper crediting of authorship, which in the mechanical arts led to validation of practice in an environment where priority and novelty became of growing value (2001: 180). As Long makes clear, ‘open display of technological practices and of practitioners-authors developed in tandem with the growing value of novelty and priority,’ where as she puts it ‘open authorship often could be used to establish priority’ (2001: 209). These practices led to ‘the development of an arena of discursive practice in which the productive value of certain technical arts (inherent in their ability to produce fabricated and constructed objects) was augmented by their status as knowledge-based disciplines’ (Long 2001: 243). It was this improved cultural status for the mechanical fields as well as for new forms of open authorship that significantly influenced the culture of knowledge. Long claims that it was these forms of open authorship that developed in the technical and mechanical arts that were highly influential when it came to ‘seventeenth-century struggles to validate new experimental methodologies’, including open authorship, in the scientific fields (2001: 250).

            However, and this is where Long’s argument becomes important in this context, she also argues that these new, open traditions of authorship developed at the same time that neoplatonic secrecy and magic and esoteric knowledge saw a rise in popularity.[15] Part of the complexity of early modern science was exactly the co-existence of ‘diverse values of transmission, including both openness and secrecy, as well as evolving attitudes of ownership and priority’ (Long 2001: 250). Long clearly complicates the opposition between openness and secrecy here, as well as the identification of science with openness. As she states: ‘until recently openness was taken to be characteristic of science, and there was very little reflection concerning whether scientific practices were actually open and, if they were, what that openness meant’ (Long 2001: 4). We can locate this association of science with openness in scholars such as Robert Merton (1973) and Derek de Solla Price (1969), who argue that science is intrinsically open (to communicate findings the scientific norm of communism is seen as essential), where technology is regarded as intrinsically secret (to sell material trademarked objects). However, as Long argues, recent historical research into the development of early modern natural philosophy, shows a far more complex and contextual picture, where Vermeir and Margócsy write that ‘the opposition between secretive technology and open science has been qualified, nuanced and contextualized’ (2012). Openness is thus intricate and enmeshed with secrecy, and integrally connected to issues of priority and patronage, where it functions in a complicated network of alliances, mixed up with authorship in relationships of power and secrecy. This is something that is supported by Paul David, who argues that a functionalist search for the origin of open science can know a historicist bias, where we take our current conception of open science for granted. A more contextualised historical search for origins shows a very different and more messy picture, one caught up in systems of power and rival political patronage (David 2008: 14–16).

            Long gives neither a positive nor a negative definition of openness, but connects it to secrecy directly when she states that ‘openness refers to the relative degree of freedom given to the dissemination of information or knowledge and involves assumptions concerning the nature and extent of the audience’ (2001: 5). Historian Koen Vermeir has similarly pointed out that ‘openness and secrecy are often interlocked, impossible to take apart, and they might even reinforce each other. They should be understood as positive (instead of privative) categories that do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other’ (2012: 165). Vermeir argues that we need to pay more attention to the specific genealogies and contexts in which the values as well as the practices of openness and secrecy have operated. Normally they are seen as negations of each other, but Vermeir notes that it might be useful to see them as gradational categories that need to be judged according to their specific historicity where openness now means something different than it did in the 17^th century, for instance. We might also consider positive notions of openness and secrecy (as in the positive notion of freedom), by looking at the intentionality behind openness: how or in what way is circulation/dissemination of scholarship positively promoted? Vermeir emphasises that something can be open but at the same time undiscoverable in a sea of information overload, which can make for new forms of secrecy.[16] Openness and secrecy also don’t always exclude each other, Vermeir states—in the publication of a coded text, for example. Finally, whether we see something as open or secret also depends on the perceiver’s viewpoint.

            This short overview of an alternative genealogy of openness shows that, if we look at the history of our cultures of knowledge and scholarly authorship and at the development of our modern systems of scholarly communication and publishing (including its technological advances), we can see that openness as a concept has always been integrally entangled with notions of secrecy. At the same time it enables us to argue, following Vermeir and Long, that it is essential to take this genealogy into account if we want to study and understand the development of the open access movement—particularly as a specific incarnation of open politics. The particular context in which the open access movement arose, related to developments in (digital) technology, the existing cultures of knowledge and unfavourable economic and material conditions, requires us to acknowledge the influence this longstanding tradition of open scholarship has had on its values and underlying motivations. At the same time it is important to study this ideal of open science and the assumption that knowledge needs to be shared by efficient forms of dissemination and consumption, as part of a historical development where, in practice, openness and secrecy co-developed in changing conditions of power, patronage, and technological development.[17]

5.2.2.2 Openness Contested

Now that I have provided an alternative genealogy of openness—one more focused on the complex interaction between openness and secrecy/closure, and the intricate relationship between the concept and practice of openness and the development of our modern system of scholarly communication—I want to offer an account of the different ways in which openness and open access have recently been theorised and practiced. What I want to show here is that openness (which as I made clear above functions as a floating signifier), and especially open access, has indeed increasingly been taken up in neoliberal rhetoric and politics. However, contrary to Tkacz and those critics of open access that relate it or its roots to neoliberalism, or see its current uptake in the Finch report or profit-focused author-pays models as exemplary, I want to explore how the understanding of open access, openness and open science has been heavily contested and how separate discourses on the concept of openness have been developed within the scholarly communication realm (Hall 2008a, Adema and Hall 2013, Eve, M. P. 2013, Fecher and Friesike 2013, Holmwood 2013b). It is important to emphasise this because if the implementation of open access in the UK, for instance, proceeds along the lines of the Finch report (2012), then there is a risk that this version of open access will become the dominant or hegemonic narrative, subsuming the variety of discourses that currently exist on open access as well as its multifaceted history.

            It is for this reason that I want to both reclaim and put forward another version of open access, one that targets business oriented approaches directly and instead positions open access as an ongoing critical project. Focused on experimentation and the exploration of new institutions and practices, this approach towards openness, examining new formats and stimulating sharing and re-use of content, can be seen as a radical alternative to, and critique of, the business ethics underlying innovations in the knowledge economy. It also offers a potential way to break-through the object-formation of the scholarly book—something that prevails in the neoliberal vision of open access (which sees the book as a product)—and the exploitation of scholarly communication as capital, as objects to sustain and innovate the knowledge economy.

            To do this I will compare the (mainly neoliberal) motives that the Finch report identifies as being fundamental to open access with the values underlying a series of experiments with radical open access publishing. I will begin by giving a short general overview of the influence of neoliberal rhetoric and ethics on higher education, and on experiments with digital academic and open access publishing more in general.

5.2.2.3 The Neoliberal Discourse on Open Access

The discourse of neoliberalism, which focuses on the reshaping of culture and society according to the demands and needs of the market, has infiltrated higher education on a number of different levels (Pekkola 2009). It has turned capitalism from a mode of production into a cultural logic where economic freedom is seen as the necessary precondition for political freedom. David Harvey, in his history of neoliberalism, describes it as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (2007: 2). Wendy Brown conceptualises neoliberalism as a political rationality that extends market values and economic rationality beyond the economy into all dimensions of human life, including our institutions, where they become part of our social actions. Neoliberalism can thus be seen a form of governmentality which ‘produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behaviour, and a new organization of the social’ (Brown 2003). Within this mode of thinking, not only are universities forced to act more and more like profit-making enterprises instead of public institutions—in a process that also involves the ongoing privatisation of Higher Education in the UK—but the focus of the knowledge economy is also placed to an ever higher degree on the extensive standardisation and the economic exploitation of knowledge, as a form of capital produced within these universities (Hall 2008a). This leads to a situation where researchers within the knowledge economy are asked to produce research that feeds directly into and sustains the neoliberal economy (Olssen and Peters 2005).

Increasingly, open access publishing is featuring in neoliberal discourses in Higher Education and government as a system to promote innovation and transparency of research (fitting in well with the aforementioned audit culture). Open access supports the knowledge economy by making the flow of information more flexible, efficient and cost-effective, and by making research more accessible to more people. This makes it easy for knowledge, as a form of capital, to be taken up by businesses for commercial re-use, stimulating economic competition and innovation. Additionally, the research process, its results and their dissemination, can be efficiently monitored and can be better made accountable as measurable outputs as part of an audit culture: think of experiments with bibliometrics and data mining, for instance, which can be used as tools to stimulate greater transparency of research. In conclusion, according to this neoliberal rhetoric, society, or better said, the individual taxpayer, gets improved value for money or return on investment with open access (Hall 2008a).

            As I argued earlier, the openness of the discourse around open access has made it easy to incorporate in a neoliberal context. Martin Eve, although critical of an equation of open access with neoliberalism, argues that open access is easily connected to measures related to the REF, its impact agenda and call for transparency and the privatisation of knowledge (Eve, M. P. 2013). This connection can be used to explain to some extent the current resistance of certain scholars to open access, again related to its potential towards increasing transparency, and towards promoting an audit culture and state control.[18] Their opposition focuses on how, in the new system proposed by government (together with HEFCE and RCUK), universities, or more specifically, university management, will have more widespread control over their academics’ ability to publish. These scholars argue that the specific implementation of the gold open access (as favoured in the report)—in which in order to publish in an open access journal a fee needs to be paid beforehand (e.g. by one’s institution)—is an attack on academic freedoms, and will most likely be aligned with the REF’s impact agenda (Sabaratnam and Kirby 2012). In this sense, while many academics are not against increasing access to scholarly publications, they are afraid that the policy recommendations of transparency and openness will be used as an instrumentalist justification for the imposition of a certain version of open access. It is one which has the potential to promote a further expansion of neoliberalism and which, as sociologist John Holmwood has argued, will function to ‘open all activities to the market and reduce public accountability of its operation’ (2013a).[19]

            To explore this neoliberal rhetoric surrounding open access in more depth, let’s now take a closer look at the Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings—or the Finch report as it is commonly known after its chair, Dame Janet Finch. This is an independent study commissioned by the then UK government science minister David Willetts, released in June 2012, drawing on the advice and support of a group of representatives of the research, library and publishing communities. The report recommends the further implementation of author-side fees for the open access publishing of journals, where an article processing charge (APC) will be needed to cover the publishing costs. This fee, paid for by authors or in most cases by their institutions, will enable the article to be opened up to the wider public under a CC-BY license (as recommended by the Finch report). This is a strategy that can be seen as maintaining and favouring the system of communication (or ecology, as the Finch report calls it) as it is currently set up.[20] In this gold APC system, the publishers’ profits will be sustained, where in green open access, depositing of articles in repositories will not require an APC. But as Philip Sykes, a librarian on the Finch panel, has said, ‘It’s not in the interests of UK scholarship to make recommendations which undermine the sustainability of the publishing industry’ (Van Noorden 2012). This has provoked Stevan Harnad to conclude that ‘The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research’ (2012).

            The report offers recommendations to ensure sustainable and efficient models for future scholarly communication defining, among other things, the criteria for success with regard to how to reach this goal. In the following quote related to APCs they accurately illustrate the neoliberal vision of promoting market mechanisms in Higher Education, and of universities acting as businesses: ‘The measures we recommend will bring greater competition on price as well as the status of the journals in which researchers wish to publish. We therefore expect market competition to intensify, and that universities and funders should be able to use their power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them both of APCs and of subscriptions’ (Finch 2012: 11).

         But this vision comes to the fore even more directly when we look at the motivations underlying the wider dissemination of research that the Finch report identifies and supports. According to the report, improving the flows of information and knowledge will promote:

• enhanced transparency, openness and accountability, and public engagement with research;
• closer linkages between research and innovation, with benefits for public policy and services, and for economic growth;
• improved efficiency in the research process itself, through increases in the amount of information that is readily accessible, reductions in the time spent in finding it, and greater use of the latest tools and services to organise, manipulate and analyse it;
• increased returns on the investments made in research, especially the investments from public funds (Finch 2012: 5)

In short, according to the vision of the Finch report, ‘these are the motivations behind the growth of the world-wide open access movement’: promoting greater transparency, accountability, innovation, economic growth, efficiency and return on investment (Finch 2012: 5). The report thus locates the values underlying open access for the most part in the effect it will have on the knowledge economy, and on how it will be a valuable return on investment.

5.2.2.4 Radical Open Access

Motivations for experimenting with alternative forms of open academic publishing are not only focused on serving the knowledge economy, however, as is implied above. Many open access advocates, for instance, see it as a movement and a practice that actually has the potential to critique and provide alternatives to the increasing marketisation of higher education and scholarly publishing. But as I will show, the schools of thought involved in open access publishing and research can be said to be more wide-reaching, more complex and enmeshed, even than that. It will therefore not be fruitful to create yet another dichotomy, distinguishing neoliberal motives for open access publishing from anti-neoliberal ones, as Holmwood implies, for instance (2013b).

            What I want to explore at this point are examples of experiments with openness in digital publishing that offer affirmative, practical dimensions, through their uptake, critique and experimentations with openness; experiments that work with their own, alternative value systems that cannot easily be classified as the negative side of a dialectic. Instead, they can be seen to endorse another set of values, based on a different underlying system of ethics, distinct from the motivations for open access as defined by the Finch report. Mostly academic-led and centred, these consist of experiments with making research available on an open access basis, using new formats such as liquid monographs, wiki-publications and remixed books. Additionally, with the establishment of new, alternative institutions and practices, they try to challenge and reconceptualise scholarly communication, while simultaneously 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. At the same time it is an approach focused on creating strong alternatives that try to break down the commercial object-formation that has encompassed the scholarly book by envisioning open access as an ongoing critical project.

            What I am calling, for shorthand, radical open access, is not one thing, however, nor is it an overarching project. It consists of various groups, peoples, institutions and projects, with their own affordances. Moreover, radical open access is also a contingent and contextual approach that cannot easily be pinned-down as, again, it is an ongoing critical project, one that endeavours to embrace its own inconsistencies, and struggles with its own conceptions of openness. Nonetheless, I want to try and point out some points of similarity that radical open access projects seem to share, not least as a way of contrasting them to the vision of open access put forward in the Finch report. I would like to mention three examples in particular of what can be seen as radical open access initiatives that have tried to experiment with progressive, counter-institutional alternatives, namely Open Humanities Press, Ted Striphas’ Differences & Repetitions wiki and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s experiments with open peer review for her book Planned Obsolescence.

            Open Humanities Press (OHP) is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory, founded in 2006 by ‘Open Access journal editors, librarians and technologists’, experimenting with open access journal and book publishing (Jöttkandt 2007: 4). OHP focuses on countering negative perceptions that still exist concerning open access and online publishing by creating a trustworthy, reliable, high-quality system for those scholars sceptical about online modes of distribution and dissemination. Battling these negative perceptions serves two goals, they argue: first, it makes experimentation with new business models possible and can therefore work to help solve the current publishing crisis in the humanities; secondly, it paves the way for further experiments in scholarly communication—with new forms of writing and publishing; with open content and open editing, for instance—something that stands at the basis of OHP’s projects (Jöttkandt 2007: 3–4). The Differences & Repetitions wiki is a site for open source writing (along the lines of libre/read-write open access), set up by Ted Striphas, which contains fully editable projects or working papers. As a personal (though at the same time collaborative) archive of writings, Striphas explores what it means to publish scholarly findings in a different way, and to experiment with new, digital, collaborative writing practices that try to not give in to the compulsion to repeat established practices. Kathleen Fitzpatrick co-established MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing community, to build networks and collaborations among media scholars. She used MediaCommons Press, a digital text platform and publishing experiment from MediaCommons, to openly review the manuscript of Planned Obsolescence. Adopting CommentPress software—a WordPress plugin that allows comments to be made next to specific paragraphs of text—the draft was made available online in 2009 to potential reviewers and commentators (alongside a traditional peer review process by NYU Press).

         First of all, then, looking at these initiatives, it becomes clear that radical open access offers a practical, affirmative engagement with open access. However, next to establishing practical and experimental (and also scholar-led) alternatives to the present scholarly publishing system, these initiatives also serve to question the system of (commercial) academic publishing as it is currently set up—a system which, as I outlined in the previous chapter, functions increasingly according to market needs. In this respect these projects aim to critique the commodification and commercialisation of research in and through academic publishing. For example, Fitzpatrick argues for the importance of establishing open access presses to save certain forms of specialised research, such as the monograph, from obsolescence in the current ‘fiscally impossible’ system of scholarly publishing. This as part of an effort to rethink our publishing practices and to ‘revitalize the academy’ (Fitzpatrick 2011: 156). Gary Hall, co-founder of OHP, has similarly noted that the current profit-driven publishing system does not allow space for works that are specialised, advanced, difficult, or avant-garde, but favours instead more marketable products, making academia as a whole ‘intellectually impoverished’ (Jӧttkandt and Hall 2007). These initiatives, in a shared critique, therefore focus on how our current publishing system increasingly serves marketisation, instead of our communication needs as academics. As Striphas claims ‘the system is functioning only too well these days—just not for the scholars it is intended to serve’ (2010).

            What’s more, we can see how experiments in radical open access not only aim to stimulate access and re-use of scholarly content by critiquing the economics and excessive commercialisation of the current scholarly publishing system, and by setting up their own alternative publishing institutions. For these initiatives open access also forms the starting point for a further interrogation of our institutions, practices, notions of academic authorship, the book, content creation, copyright and publication, among other things. Here the focus is on exploring the kind of ethical and responsible questions that, according to Hall ‘we really should have been asking all along’ (2011: 13). This questioning of institutions also focuses on the hegemonic print-on-paper paradigm that, as Hall and Jӧttkandt from OHP argue, still structures our current (digital) scholarly practices, including our standards for reviewing and certifying academic work (2007). We also need to keep in mind, as Striphas notes, the specific historical context in which our currently dominant structures were forged, according to circumstances which might not apply anymore today (2010). In this respect there seems to be a combined aim to, as Fitzpatrick argues, ensure our interrogations not only explore our scholarly institutions but also our own scholarly practices of doing research, writing and reviewing in a digital context (2011: 10). As Hall and Jӧttkandt point out, this might involve exploring ‘a new knowledge, a new grammar, a new language and literacy, a new visual/aural/linguistic code of the digital that is capable of responding to the singularity and inventiveness of such [digital] texts with an answering singularity and inventiveness?’ (2007).

            The practical aspects of these interrogations of our scholarly forms of communication come to the fore in some of these radical open access projects too. For instance, Fitzpatrick’s experiment with peer-to-peer review very much focussed on re-envisioning peer review and quality control in a digital context, pushing it towards a more community-oriented system. Furthermore, her experiment aimed to change the way we think about academic publishing and peer review away from ‘a system focused on the production and dissemination of individual products to imagining it as a system focused more broadly on facilitating the processes of scholarly work’ (Fitzpatrick 2011: 11). Striphas similarly argues that we need to engage with peer review—as a specific fixture of scholarly communication—more creatively in order to explore its future. His wiki, functioning as a form of pre-publication review, is a good example of that, as well as comprising an investigation into more communal forms of writing, questioning the individual author (Striphas 2011). Hall and his colleagues explored the rethinking of the book, authorship and authority in OHP’s Liquid and Living Books series, which are books published using wikis that are available on a read/write basis. With this open, collaborative, and distributed way of publishing OHP endeavours to raise ‘all sorts of interesting questions for ideas of academic authorship, fair use, quality control, accreditation, peer-review, copyright, Intellectual Property, and content creation’ (Hall 2008b).

But radical open access also involves the critique of openness as a concept and the practices of openness themselves. This is of course something that Tkacz, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, sees as missing in open projects, where he feels there has been too little reflection on the concept of openness and on its specific projects. What radical open access projects share, however, is a common aim to emphasise that there are ways for open access not to be simply a neoliberal or even an economic issue. Instead, they explore open access as a concept and practice based on experimentation, sharing and community, among other things. We can see this in Fitzpatrick’s aim to shift the discourse on the way we perceive open access away from a focus on costs to a focus on values (2012a); but we can also see this in Striphas ongoing critical exploration of the drawbacks and benefits of his own open research projects, where he sees his Differences & Repetitions wiki not as ‘a model’ but as a ‘thing to think with’ (2011). In this respect the engagement of radical open access with openness is very similar to a specific vision of open politics where politics can and needs to be rethought in an ongoing manner, adapting to new contexts and conditions, functioning as a floating signifier. According to Étienne Balibar, for instance, a more interesting and radical notion of politics involves focusing on the process of the democratisation of democracy itself, thus turning democracy into a form of continuous struggle or critical self-reflection. Democracy is not an established reality, nor is it a mere ideal; it is rather a permanent struggle for democratisation (Balibar 2008). And in this respect open access can and should be understood in similar terms: not as a homogeneous project striving to become a dominating model or force; not as a thing, an object, or a model with pre-described meaning or ideology, but as a project with an unknown outcome, as an ongoing series of critical struggles. And this is exactly why we cannot pin down open (nor radical open access) as a concept, but instead need to leave it open: open to otherness and difference, and open to adapt to different circumstances. To explore this idea of open politics in relation to open access more in depth, it will be helpful to look at the work of Gary Hall, who has written extensively on this subject.

5.2.2.5 Radical Open Politics

Hall, in his always already contingent conception of open politics, engages with the work of media theorist Mark Poster, to think through what (an open) politics might be, which he formulates in the context of this theoretical exchange as a ‘hypercyberdemocracy’. Similar to Balibar, Hall’s conception of openness and open politics is not one that should be conceptualised as a project or a model. He warns, for instance, that when it comes to politics on the Internet, we should be cautious about forms of predetermined politics in which ‘politics would be reduced to just the rolling out of a political plan, project, or program that is already known and decided upon in advance’ (Hall 2008a: 36). This would close down what politics is, and what it means to be political, without giving space to the potential of the new and the experimental. As Hall states, in such a scenario ‘there would be no responsible or ethical opening to the future, the unknown, uncertain, unseen, and unexpected’ (2008a: 36). Hall thus argues for the development of new, specific and singular theories of politics—especially concerning the politics of digital media; theories in which politics is responsive to the context and developments it encounters (such as those described in Poster’s account of cyberdemocracy), where these have the potential to alter both our politics and our understanding and analysis of digital culture (2008a: 158–159). Hall points out that in Poster’s essay, this contextual connection comes to the fore in, among other things, his argument toward the intrinsic connection between humans and technology. Hall extends this argumentation—referring to Stiegler’s idea of originary technology and Derrida’s concept of the technological condition—by explaining that political subjects are continuously constituted by the political networks in which they interact and vice versa. Since ‘the human is always already constituted in and by a relation with technology’ (Hall 2008a: 178), this means we are already cyborgs before we interact with Internet politics. For Hall, cyberdemocracy emerges as a potential space for new, ‘unthought’ forms of democracy, where ‘in order to understand the politics of the Internet we need to remain open to the possibility of a form of politics that is “something other than democracy” as we can currently conceive it’ (2008a: 179–180).

Such a conception of open politics runs into a number of challenges as for many embracing such a position or way of thinking and practicing might be to risk too much, not least because it has the potential ultimately to place in question what we have come to understand as democracy. In this sense, as Hall claims, many critics hold on to conventional conceptions of (Internet) politics and democracy, ‘including ideas that view it in terms of technological determinism, citizenship, the public sphere, and democracy’ (2008a: 182). In this sense Hall and Poster go further than Balibar. For Balibar, rethinking politics as a process is still seen as a ‘democratisation of democracy’, where we can end being caught up in a framework of change that necessarily needs to be more democratic, instead of thinking out of the democratic box. Hall eventually argues, beyond, but at the same time with, Poster (whilst pointing to the ‘modernistic’ aspects that remain part of Poster’s politics), that we need to be open to both politics and hyperpolitics—which are not easily disconnected—where hyperpolitics ‘names a refusal to consider the question of politics as closed or decided in advance, and a concomitant willingness to open up an unconditional space for thinking about politics and the political “beyond” the way in which they have been conventionally conceived—a thinking of politics which is more than politics, while still being political’ (2008a: 197–198).

         Applying this argumentation to the specific politics of open access publishing and archiving, Hall states that it is too easy to see open access as merely an extension of neoliberalism, which it necessarily is or can be, when it can also be conceived as a progressive cyberutopian democratic concept. However, Hall is not interested in exploring open access along either of these lines as the two sides of the digital debate, which as we argued before, are not so easily distinguished in the form of a dialectic. He is concerned, not so much with attaching pre-existing political labels to open access publishing, as in the potential of open access and of Internet politics ‘to resist and reconfigure the very nature of politics as we currently understand it, its basis in notions of citizenship, the public sphere, democracy, and so on’ (Hall 2008a: 195). This focus on a ‘politics of undecidability’ doesn’t mean though that we do not need to make decisions, or don’t need to cut – and this is where the opposition of openness versus closure again becomes untenable as they are intrinsically two sides of the same coin. By the same token, while Hall does not offer a fully-fledged politics, he nonetheless insists that we need to be political, as we still need to make affirmative, practical and ethical political decisions (2008a: 196–197). And through these decisions we need to imagine, invent and experiment with new forms of politics, by asking questions and remaining open towards, our notions of politics, scholarship, authorship and, in this context specifically, with the book. As Hall concludes, with respect to a cultural studies politics, ‘as such, digitization and open access represent an opportunity, a chance, a risk, for the (re)politicization—or, better, hyperpoliticization—of cultural studies; a reactivization of the antagonistic dimension that is precisely what cultural studies’ politics is’ (2008a: 203).

         Hall is not the only one who is exploring such ideas of openness and experimentation in relation to the political in an academic context. In his influential book The University in Ruins, Readings formulated a similarly forceful argument focused on openness (though not specifically on open access) and experimentation in his exploration of the ideal type of the University of Thought, which he envisions as an alternative to the University of Excellence. As he puts it, ‘What I would like to suggest is that we recognise that, with the decline of the nation-state, the University has become an open and flexible system and that we should try to replace the empty idea of excellence with the empty name of Thought’ (Readings 1996: 3). Readings argues that the original cultural mission that determined the logic of the university in the past has been declining, producing a situation where from a connection to the nation state (producing and sustaining an idea of national culture) it has become a transnational bureaucratic company following the discourse of excellence and accountability (1996: 11). From this position Readings points out that we should let go of the idea that the university has a social mission connected to cultural identity, when ‘the notion of culture ceases to mean anything vital for the University as a whole’ and ‘culture no longer matters as an idea for the institution’ (1996: 90–91). As he states, introducing new referents won’t do the university any good; rather it is important that the university provides a context where judgement towards cultural value as well as to the value and meaning of the university itself is left open. In this de-referentialised space that the university then becomes, Readings suggests we can start to think notions of community and communication differently, and thus begin to envision them as places for radical dissensus (1996: 167). We need a community without a common identity, which consists of singularities, not of subjects. In this respect we can’t refer to an idea outside of ourselves and the university for a community’s justification; instead, we need to take responsibility for our immediate actions here, in relation to our present contextualized practices. Readings thus reiterates that we need to keep the question of evaluation open. However, just as in the thinking of Hall (and Barad), this does not absolve us from the responsibility of making cuts, a necessity Readings formulates as the need to make judgments about issues of values. At the same time, Readings does not see these judgments as final, as they themselves are part of an ongoing critique and discussion: ‘Value is a question of judgment, a question whose answers must continually be discussed’ (1996: 134). Knowledge for Readings then becomes a permanent question, where ‘Thought does not function as an answer but as a question’ (Readings 1996: 159–160). He is thus interested in conditions of openness and decidedness in higher education that enable agonism and heteronomous communities of dissent. This comes to the fore when he argues that disciplinary structures should be rethought and reconfigured periodically; they should remain open to ensure disciplinarity remains a permanent question (Readings 1996: 177). In Readings’ vision these communities of dissent are also non-humanist in their basic outlook, where they profess an obligation to nonhuman otherness. As he states: ‘to speak of obligation is to engage with an ethics in which the human subject is no longer a unique point of reference. The obligation is not to other humans but to the condition of things, ta pragmata’ (Readings 1996: 187).

         What these two readings of openness in an academic context by Hall and Readings show is the importance of remaining open to, and affirmatively exploring new forms of, open politics, while still taking responsibility for the decisions and value judgments we need to make as part of these experiments. Experimentation in this respect can be seen as a form of ongoing critique. This is also the way experimentation is being explored in forms of radical open access, I would argue, where it serves as a means to re-perform our existing institutions and scholarly practices in a more ethical and responsible way. Experimentation thus stands at the basis of a rethinking of scholarly communication and the university in general, and can even potentially be seen as a means to rethink politics itself too. For instance, by experimenting in an open way with the idea and the concept of the book, but also with the materiality and the system of material production surrounding it—which includes our ideas of the material and materiality—we can ask important questions concerning authorship, the fixity of the text, quality, authority and responsibility; issues that lie at the basis of what scholarship is and what the functions of the university should be. Radical open access, as an affirmative and experimental practice, can therefore be seen as an effort towards the deconstruction of the object-formation and commodification of the book, which is maintained by the print-based institutions of material production as well as by our own repetitive and consolidating scholarly communication practices. It can be seen as a political and ethical effort to re-perform these stabilisations (Derrida et al. 2003: 86, Hall 2008a: 76).[21]

            In the previous passages I have explored open access, and in specific forms of radical open access book publishing, as affirmative and continuous strategies directed toward rethinking our market-based publishing institutions and our own academic research practices, as well as the object formation that takes part through forms of academic capitalism. Although open access, in its neoliberal guise, also has the potential to contribute to this object formation, this chapter has made a plea for reclaiming open access by focusing: on its potential to critically re-perform our print-based institutions and practices; and on its potential to experiment with new ideas of politics, scholarly communication, the university, and the book.  Now is precisely the time to focus on a different discourse of openness—similar to reframing the historical discourse on the book as an object, as discussed in the previous chapter—to emphasise these other aspects of openness, and the potential for change it also inhibits, and to encourage a diversity of experiments with open access books.

            Experimentation is essential here, not only as an integral aspect of forms of radical open access, but also as a strategy on its own to break-through the material structures and practices surrounding the object-formation of the book. As Kember has written, ‘Experimenting with academic writing and publishing is a form of political intervention, a direct engagement with the underlying issues of privatization and marketization in academia’ (2014). To explore this concept of experimentation in more depth, however, I want to distinguish it from neoliberal notions of innovation. I want to do so because, as with open access, the motives, values, as well as the goals that lie behind these two concepts differ fundamentally. (For instance, the undecidedness (or openness) towards its outcomes can be seen as an important aspect of experiments with radical open access.) In what follows I therefore want to differentiate the business rhetoric of innovation that accompanies the university of excellence and more neoliberal visions of openness, from the vision of experimentation as promoted from within cultural studies, among other fields. The latter vision that will be illustrated by a selection of research and publishing efforts that specifically explore experimentation as a discourse and practice of critique, especially with respect to the current system of scholarly object-formation.

5.3 Experimental Research Practices

5.3.1 Commodification of Knowledge and the Business Logic of Innovation

As established above, the open access discourse on making knowledge available for free on the web without barriers to access and reuse, is being accompanied increasingly by a neoliberal rhetoric. In particular, this rhetoric pertains to the knowledge economy and its need for continual innovation. Following this demand for innovation and the transparency that it relates to, making research results available online is seen to aid the search for new sustainable business models, to help the creation of competitive advantage, and to maintain the successive testing of new products to satisfy consumer demand. Within this context, experiments with digital, open publishing increasingly takes place with a specific outcome already in place: to ensure that a new publishing or business model is viable, and that it is effective, in order for it to become a model which can be monetised with the ultimate goal of increasing return on investment. Besides that, making publicly created research information and data available in this way is designed to allow the private sector in general to thrive and to help drive further innovation and creativity for all kinds of business opportunities, enabling the private sector and our economy at large to be more profitable and competitive.

            Consequentially, this can create situations where our ideas of experimentation, or even of critique as open intellectual enquiry, are challenged by this corporate rhetoric of innovation. Researchers are increasingly asked to experiment with new ideas, methods or practices not just for experiments sake, but in the name of innovation, leading to results that are deemed to be an improvement to the previous situation, in the sense that they serve dynamic economic growth. For if we adhere to a neoliberal logic, then we need continual innovation to stimulate the competitive mechanisms that encourage this dynamic growth. As Giroux states: ‘In its dubious appeals to universal laws, neutrality, and selective scientific research, neoliberalism eliminates the very possibility of critical thinking, without which democratic debate becomes impossible’ (2005: 10). Critical thought, Giroux argues, has given way to market-driven values and corporate interests. Knowledge becomes a product, a commodity, just another form of capital (Giroux 2010). As Fitzpatrick similarly argues, ‘having marketability as our only indicator of the value of scholarship or a scholar’s work represents a neoliberal corruption of the critical project in which we as scholars are ostensibly engaged’ (2012b).

            We can see a situation arise where the elements of unpredictability that accompany experimental scholarly methods are filtered out in favour of risk assessments and contingency plans (risk-aversion), where the notion of critique, of pushing boundaries, of rethinking systems, is replaced by demands for increased efficiency and transparency. The goal is to make experimentation predictable, where experiments are designed to achieve the goals they were set out to achieve, creating outcomes that are measurable and demonstrable, namely mirroring a situation where innovation is often closely linked to specific objectives, namely those that encourage economic growth.

Pellizzoni and Ylönen point out that perpetual innovation as part of the knowledge economy is seen as one of the guiding principles of the neoliberal era (2012). Within the knowledge economy, innovation is then conceptualized as a collective endeavour, as a coalition between education and industry. The OECD report The knowledge-based economy (1996), quoted in Roberts and Peters, states that ‘innovation is driven by the interaction of producers and users in the exchange of both codified and tacit knowledge’, and pertains to a model of knowledge flows and relationships among industry, government and academia in the development of science and technology (2008). Based on her analysis of the perceptions of Canadian health scientists, Wendy McGuire argues that this reorientation of knowledge production towards a collaboration of research and industry is promoting a new vision of what constitutes legitimate science, one based on innovation policies: ‘Innovation policy is both an ideological discourse that promotes a new vision of legitimate science, emphasizing social and economic relevance, and a neoliberal strategy to change the organization of knowledge production through the intensification of relationships between university scientists, industry and government’ (2013). In order to develop a critique of this notion of perpetual innovation that is increasingly structuring our knowledge domains, I will look at experimentation as an alternative discourse. In particular I want to turn to a selection of alternative conceptualisations of experimentation, to examine how these are practically implemented in radical forms of open, online publishing. The openness of the politics of these projects lies with their will to experiment, where experimentation is understood as a heterogeneous, unpredictable, singular and uncontained process or experience. In this respect they argue for a more inclusive vision of experimentation, one that is open for ambivalence and for failure. This vision is all the more important in the context of monograph publishing, where it could be argued that issues of access and experimentation are crucial to the future of the scholarly book, if the critical potentiality of the book as a medium is to remain open to new political, economic and intellectual contingencies. I will thus explore the idea of experimentation in more depth from a specific cultural studies perspective. I want to do so because cultural studies has a special relationship with experimentation and because of this it is in an excellent position to put forward an alternative vision with respect to experimenting in open digital publishing, a vision that is different from the neoliberal focus on experimentation as a force to drive innovation, capital accumulation and object-formation.

5.3.2 Cultural Studies and Experimentation

In her book The Ethics of Cultural Studies (2005), Zylinska refers to this specific engagement of cultural studies with experimentation, which marks the ‘open-ended nature of the cultural studies project’, as Zylinska calls it. This means that, as a project, cultural studies is constantly being repositioned, without an assured or fixed outcome. For Zylinska, this openness to the unknown, to forms of knowledge and politics that cannot be described that easily in more ‘established disciplinary discourses’, is what makes cultural studies intrinsically ethical (2005: 38–39).

            Cultural studies has also been interested in exploring more inclusive forms of knowledge that acknowledge otherness and differentiation, and that are more affective and experiential. This exploration by cultural theorists of different forms of knowledge was initiated by restoring the separation between the concepts of experience and experiment. Under the heading of Empiricism, Raymond Williams, in his Keywords volume, explores the etymology of experiment and how it got to mean something different from experience with which, until the 18^th century, it was interchangeable. Experience started to mean subjective or internal knowledge, where experiment came to be aligned with the scientific method of an arranged methodical observation of an event, a theoretical knowledge directed towards the external world. Cultural theorist Gregory Seigworth identifies the search for a more inclusive knowledge, one that includes both experience and experiment, not only in Williams, but in the projects of a variety of other thinkers too, most notably Deleuze, Benjamin and Bergson (2006). Seigworth argues that the current renewed attention to empiricism, as a resurgent culturalist experiential paradigm, is based on the influence and popularity of these thinkers within cultural studies as a result of the boom in Deleuzian cultural studies. This is an empiricism where experience and experiment—or practice and theory in more general terms—are still one and the same and are not split up. Within this paradigm the concept of experience operates beyond the interpretative powers of a being’s knowing sensibility. Experience does not belong to the subject, nor is it mediating between subject and object. It is, as Seigworth states, referring to Williams and his concept of ‘structures of feeling’, something that needs a form of autonomy; experience needs to become an active potential, freed from the fixed and the personal it has come to be associated with in daily life. For Williams, experience is crucial to tackle and grasp change, flux, flow, all that escapes our fixed efforts at signification and at knowing. Experience is thus directed towards process and emergence. The splitting of experience and experiment, however, lead to the distinction between practical and theoretical, between subjective and objective knowledge, and between experience past and present. As Seigworth states, Williams wanted wholeness again with respect to this concept, where experience was now based upon a set of exclusions (of theory, of creativity, of the present and future) and upon a subjectively centred model of consciousness (2006).

            In keeping with the viewpoint I expressed earlier when presenting my alternative genealogy of openness, just as it is not useful to maintain the binary between open and closed, so it is likewise not beneficial to emphasise the rupture between experience and experiment. Instead, we need to enable a critique that remains open to question, but that can at the same time be reconfigured, that can be cut and (temporally) fixed at some points to establish meaning and signify knowing. It is a knowing that in this case goes beyond an internal subjectivity and includes the external life world.

            Seigworth goes on to show how Benjamin, Deleuze and Bergson all explored ways to establish this wholeness. Benjamin’s notion of speculative knowledge, the knowledge derived from experience, focuses on the incorporeal and the ephemeral. Unlike a model of knowledge based on representation and resemblance, and similar to Barad’s theory of posthumanist performativity, speculative knowledge for Benjamin is nonrepresentational. It belongs to neither subject nor object and is neither inside nor outside. For Deleuze, experience refers to open intensities and sensations (affect), which are not subsumed necessarily by faculties of knowing and interpretation. Experience is open-ended and emergent, not yet articulated. For Bergson, experience and experiment are linked in intuition, which exceeds or overflows the intellect. Intuition is a lived immediacy, it is mobile, processual; it connects past, present and future, where experience can then be seen as memory, duration and experiment. This relates to William’s idea of the pre-emergent, the not yet articulated, where a practical consciousness functions as a creative process. Williams tried to find space for creative intuition, for an experimental openness to the world beyond our fixing, interpretive consciousness and pre-existent conceptual frameworks—an openness towards multiplicities. In this respect Williams wanted to analyse the flows between process and structure, between a thing’s singularity and its contexts of relations, to explore where something new emerges (Seigworth 2006).

            Similar to Williams’ aim to explore experimentation as a way of opening up space for difference and otherness beyond our totalising conceptual knowledge frameworks, philosopher Samuel Weber intends to use experimentation to deconstruct one of our most established knowledge fixtures: the university. In the context of experimenting with and rethinking scholarly institutions and practices, his work is therefore essential. Weber connects the search for a different concept and meaning for experimentation directly to the need to break down the modern conception of the university. This conception depends, he argues, on a bias towards universally valid interpretative knowledge, or on a notion of knowledge as well as a vision of the human as unifying, holistic, and totalising. Weber notices the integral connection between this perception of knowledge and neoliberalism: ‘What lurks behind its ostensible universalism is the message that there are no longer any alternatives to the dominant neoliberal political-economic system’ (2000). For Weber, however, hope lies in the experimental method derived from the modern sciences, which is focused on creating replicable sequences and repetition, and which has an orientation towards the future and the world as open, consisting of a plurality of possibilities. However, the scientific method still subsumes the particular under a general conceptual framework. Like Seigworth, Weber therefore explores alternative conceptualisations of experimentation that are open to ambivalence. To this end he adopts Kierkegaard’s notion of experimenting as a verb. The latter emphasises experimentation as a notion where the singular gets articulated without letting its particularities dissolve into the universal. This opens up room for that what is different in repetition, for the exception, and for transformation in repetition. Using Kierkegaard’s notion, Weber finds a way to introduce uncertainty, unpredictability and ambivalence in our modern conception of experimentation, one that seems to go directly against the neoliberal rhetoric of planned outcomes, risk analysis and contingency plans, all of which are designed to filter out the uncertain and the unpredictable (2000).

            Here we can see how a re-conceptualisation of experimentation within the discourse of cultural studies towards iterability and difference in repetition, has opened up possibilities to imagine cultural studies itself as a space of experimentation. In addition to the relationship Zylinska sketches between the role played by experimentation in cultural studies and the latter’s open-ended nature, Simon O’Sullivan connects experimentation directly to cultural studies’ performative dimension. In a Deleuzian posthumanist reading of cultural studies as experimentation, O’Sullivan breaks with a focus on the interpretation and representation of culture, and opposes the idea of an object of study (culture) that gets interpreted by a human subject. This idea works as a mechanism to fix and define culture, as well as fixing both the subject and knowledge, however fragmented they are. O’Sullivan proposes cultural studies be understood as a pragmatic experimental program moving away from stability, affirming cultural studies as a critical process, as a doing. Using the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome, he envisions cultural studies as a dynamic, fluid, open and interdisciplinary system, capable of creating the world differently. This enables multiplicities and the thinking of virtual potentialities. O’Sullivan notices how cultural studies, through its actual institutionalising mechanisms stabilises, and through experimentation creates new lines of flight. Cultural studies is thus both programmatic and diagrammatic (2002). It is this performative dimension—more than a representational one—and the way it is apparent in and being practiced in cultural studies as part of its engagement with experimenting, that I am most interested in here.

            Now that we have taken a closer look at the way Williams, Seigworth, Weber and O’Sullivan have re-conceptualised the concept of experimentation from within the discourse of cultural studies, we can make some more general remarks about experimentation from the wider perspective of humanities knowledge production, while still opposing the business logic underlying neoliberal forms of experimentation as innovation. According to the above thinkers, experimenting means to welcome the possibility of new thinking, to explore the conditions where ideas and phenomena that escape the formulations of previous conceptual paradigms emerge. To create and think new forms of knowledge, experimentation is reconciled with experience to include speculative forms of knowledge and difference in repetition, thus providing room for ambivalence, for the ephemeral and for failure, for that which does not fit. Experimentation here has the potential to become part of knowledge production in general, where it can be used to critique the essentialising object-formation of our scholarly institutions (including the book), and to explore what new forms scholarship will take, how it will continue to transform itself, ourselves, and our understanding of the world we live in.

            In this respect, it is important to emphasise—and this is where I want to connect back to the work of Barad—that we as scholars are always already a part of the intra-action of the experiment. Based on her reading of Bohr, Barad argues that our experimenting, intertwined with our theorising, is a material practice. Both theory and experiment are complexly entangled dynamic practices of material engagement with the world. They are both material-discursive enactments that we as scholars perform through our scholarly practices. We therefore produce matter and meaning through our experimenting. And this is in turn a material engaging with the world in which our experimenting is not an intervening from the outside, but an intra-acting from within, as we as scholars are part of the experimental apparatus (Barad 2007: 55–56).

5.3.3 Radical Open Access and Experimentation

We can see the value of the above articulation of experimentation for the concept of openness, and open access publishing more specifically, in forms of what I have called radical open access. Here experimentation in many ways takes central stage, in contrast with more mainstream forms of publishing. For instance, Striphas has noted that experiments in cultural studies publishing have taken place at the fringes of the field, where the former has mostly been ignored and undervalued as a subject of exploration (2010). The same can be said about experiments in open access publishing. Radical open access can therefore be seen to function as a critique of the wider open access movement. In the latter, strategies of providing access to information and of making open, online scholarship more qualitatively esteemed, are rather disconnected from strategies focused on experimentation.[22] In this respect radical open access also constitutes an integral critique of openness, both of the strategic openness of the wider open access movement, but also of the more neoliberal incarnations of open access that favour a business logic and that promote the existing hegemonic power structures and vested interests of the scholarly publishing system. Both are in their own way very anxious about questioning or disturbing the object-formation of the book.

              Meanwhile, experimentation, as described above, also serves to question the fixtures in scholarly (book) publishing that we have grown accustomed too, especially those established as part of our modern system of scholarly communication and the mostly print-based media ecologies of the 20th century. For example, Striphas is interested in exploring how, through experimentation, we can perform our scholarly practices differently in order to rethink those practices that are pertinent today, both in theory and practice. Our socially constructed habits and honoured ways of doing things lead us to engage with repetitive practices in the way we read, write, do research, publish and assess our research findings. We need to think more creatively and expansively, he argues, about the fixtures in scholarly communication and how they might work otherwise, like peer review and authorship, for instance. As stated previously, Striphas uses his Difference and Repetitions wiki to explore this: to experiment with new, digital, and collaborative writing practices that challenge the accustomed tradition of single authorship and the idea of ownership of works and ideas, trying to not give in to the compulsion to repeat and merely produce more of the same. For Striphas, the open wiki experiment is not meant to function as a new type of institution but as a thing to think with, ongoing, changing, uncertain. As he points out, this experiment has thought him, and can teach us, ‘a great deal about the types of questions we might ask about our performances of scholarly communication in general, and of academic journal publishing in particular’ (Striphas 2011).

            Tara McPherson likewise frames some of the publishing projects she has been involved in—such as Vectors, an openly available multimedia journal and platform that investigates the intersections of technology and culture, and Scalar, a multimedia scholarly publishing and authoring platform—specifically within a framework of experimentation. The aim of both of these projects is to use experimentation to explore new publishing practices that try to make better use of the potentialities and affordances that the Internet has to offer, from multimodal scholarship to networked forms of communication. As McPherson puts it, in this respect, ‘Vectors has functioned largely as an experimental space, publishing work that is formally challenging and that explores the boundaries of what might count as scholarly argument’ (2010). For these specific projects this has meant examining the boundaries between creative expression and scholarship, exploring so-called ‘emergent genres’ that ‘better take advantage of the affordances of computation’. This includes investigating ‘bold new forms of experimentation and bookishness’ to push scholarly publishing in the humanities further (McPherson 2010). For McPherson, experimentation and open access are aligned projects here, where for her this framework of experimentation also stretches to the ownership and distribution of scholarly content (2010). Although she promotes broad experimentation, McPherson is also aware of the fact that it might not be sustainable in the long run. Although we need to continue to experiment, we should also, as she puts it, ‘evolve more “standardized” structures and interfaces that will allow us to delineate more stable genres and to scale multimodal scholarship’ (2010). Nonetheless, this process should not stand in the way of exploring new modes of scholarship and publishing, where McPherson emphasises the ongoing need for forms of bold experimentation.

            A similar sense of open experimentation can be found in the C-Search publishing project. C-Search, the cultural studies e-archive, is a free, open access archive for cultural studies research literature and related materials, and is provided as a further supplement to the Culture Machine e-journal. These archives can be seen as an experiment with digital, open texts, to explore some of the possibilities these have beyond merely replicating print in the online world. With their lack of fixity, and permanence, with their undermining of traditional intermediaries and roles, and their use of and incorporation of different media, they have the potential to fundamentally transform the content they transmit, and with that, to change our relationship to knowledge. This provides us with radical ethical and political questions with respect to authority and legitimacy in a digital age. The clear intention of Hall (one of the founders of C-Search), is to experiment with these latter, more uncomfortable issues, and the kind of impact open publishing has on these (2008a: 19). He argues that C-Search is motivated by a need to creatively experiment with the invention of new institutional forms, to think the university differently, and to helps us conceive a different future for it (Hall 2008a: 10). Hall and his colleagues, as mentioned before, also experiment with how to reimagine our institutions via Open Humanities Press, especially in its experiments with publishing work in non-traditional formats, such as liquid, living, wiki-books that re-use and repackage existing material, and that are open for collaborative editing. These books are questioning our notions of authorship, legitimacy, and quality assessment and are exploring the idea of research as a more processual event. These kinds of institutions, Hall argues, are structurally open. As a form or experiment, this makes it easier for them to be incorporated into a neoliberal discourse—as I have tried to show with the example of the Finch report and open access publishing. But it also gives them their force as forms and sites of resistance. In particular, it gives them ethical and political power to create something different, an alternative, a critique and a resistance to the neoliberal discourse and its hegemonic project.[23] Echoing Bergson, Hall argues that these kinds of experimental archives and institutions can be seen as, as he calls it, singular, different, alternative instances of a kind of experimental, creative militantism from the side of cultural studies (2008a: 207). These institutions, like Weberian experiments, are never finished, nor do they know the answers to the theoretical and practical questions they pose or the outcomes of the various experiments they are conducting. In this sense they can be seen as always emerging institutions (Hall 2008a: 227).

5.4 Conclusion

The last two chapters have explored the systems and narratives that surround the material production of academic books, books that we as scholars produce, disseminate and consume on a daily basis. This analysis has tried to pay attention to the specific technological developments and affordances of the book, its entangled political economy of knowledge production, and the discourses narrating the object-formation of the book in academia and scholarly publishing, which have been the subject of chapter 4. Through this exploration I have examined what specific roles the book as a scholarly object, both materially and conceptually, has come to play in the current scholarly communication constellation, what struggles it has encountered along its way, and what potential opportunities for intervention this might offer.

            In this chapter I have tried to supplement this material-discursive genealogy of the monograph’s object-formation with alternative visions and practices related to both its past and future, to show how a politics of the book can extend beyond dichotomies such as openness and closure/secrecy, experimentation and experience, and object and process. In this respect, the book, and the practices and discourses surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of its material incarnation, offers an important starting point to envision and shape our scholarly communication system differently. Through its open-ended nature (again, both conceptually and materially) (Drucker 2004), the book offers an opportunity for experimental/experiential critique, and for practices of ongoing experimentation. Affirmatively engaging with its affordances can thus enable us to explore more ethical, alternative and responsible forms of doing research. Experimenting through our discourses and practices and through the material form of the book will potentially give us the opportunity to deconstruct and re-cut what we still see as fixed and naturalised features of how we communicate as scholars. Critiquing these structures, however, means at the same time taking responsibility for the new boundaries that we enact, with respect to authorship, copyright, originality and authority. Nevertheless, through our alternative incisions we can start to imagine a potentially new politics of the book, one that is open-ended but which responds to its environment; and with that we might be able to also invent new forms of politics. This critique of our forms, narratives and performances of publishing and research needs to be ongoing however, where it involves a series of continuous critical struggles concerning both the past and the future of the book, materiality, the university, politics, etc. Within this contingent context, our open-ended book experiments will need to respond perpetually to the new technological, economical and institutional constellations that they encounter.

[1] refers in this respect to ‘policy-driven’ open access, related to an economic agenda that is focused on research as innovation (2014b).

[2] Also see Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive Proposal’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal

[3] The Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, an independent group chaired by professor Dame Janet Finch, was set up in October 2011 to examine how UK-funded research can be made more accessible.  It released the report, “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications”, also known as the “Finch Report” in June 2012. On 16 July 2012, the UK government announced that it has accepted the report’s recommendations. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research and http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

[4] These experiments focus on both access and re-use, on a critique of the overly commercial political-economy surrounding publishing, and on establishing both a practical and experimental method. Radical open access can thus be seen as theories or practices of open access that are focused on openness as a means to: critique established systems; rethink the book and the humanist understandings that accompany it; change scholarly practices by focusing on ‘doing’ scholarship differently; explore experimentation, and finally—and perhaps most importantly in this context—to critique the concept and practices of openness, as well as the dichotomies between closed and open, and between the book and the net that keep one being (re-)introduced. The term radical open access was first introduced by Gary Hall at a talk at Columbia University, entitled ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ (2010).

[5] Although divided in its views on what openness is and should be, and how we should go about achieving open access, one can argue that there is such a thing as an open access movement. As Guédon has put it: ‘Open access became a movement after a meeting was convened in Budapest in December 2001 by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute. That meeting witnessed a vigorous debate about definitions, tactics, and strategies, and out of this discussion emerged two approaches which have become familiar to all observers, friends, or foes’ (2004: 315). In order to further the promotion of open access and achieve higher rates of adoption and compliance among the academic community, a number of strategic alliances have been forged between the various proponents of open access. It can be claimed that these alliances (those associated with green open access, for instance) have focused mostly on making the majority if not indeed all of the research accessible online without a paywall (Gratis open access) as their priority. Although they cannot be simply contrasted and opposed to the former (often featuring many of the same participants), other strategic alliances have focused more on gaining the trust of the academic community, trying to take away some of the fears and misunderstandings that exist concerning open, online publishing.

[6] See Peter Suber’s Open Access overview: http://www.earlham.edu/∼peters/fos/overview.htm

[7] For a more detailed description of the reasons why books and book publishing were slow to adopt to open access and open access publishing, see Adema and Hall (2013).

[8] As already discussed in the introduction, this narrative of crisis can be misleading, presupposing an idealised past and the possibility of a teleological move beyond or out of this ‘crisis’. In saying this, I do not intend to dismiss the dire situation in which book publishing finds itself, but I want to emphasise that the scholarly book has never been sustainable and in this sense would be in a ‘perpetual crisis’ (Adema 2010, Copper and Marx, 2014). In this respect Kember’s insights are valuable, where she prefers instead to ‘recognise the genealogy of crisis that is, in effect, no crisis at all, but rather an ongoing, dynamic and antagonistic encounter with all that is considered to be external to the humanities – digitisation and marketisation included’ (Kember, 2014b: 107).

[10] Hall makes a subdivision in discourses concerning open access publishing motives. He distinguishes the liberal, democratising approach; the renewed public sphere approach; and the gift economy approach (Hall 2008a: 197).

[11]An argument can be made here, based on the work of Wendy Brown, that it is not so much an ‘open’ politics, as it is the logic of the free or open economy that underlies this governmentality. For one could assert that it is not an open politics which stimulates a neoliberal rhetoric, but the fact that there is a lack of politics altogether within neoliberalist forms of governmentality—following Brown’s analysis of the waning of homo politicus and the rise of homo economicus in neoliberal systems. In this sense the destruction of the democratic imaginary is again not based on an open politics, but on a lack of politics, on the demise of the idea of the demos (Brown et al. 2012).

[12] The list of people critiquing or being critical of ‘openness’ is actually quite extensive, especially if we expand it to works that focus on discourses related to cognitive capitalism and knowledge work. A critical exploration of openness can be found in the following works, among others: Hall (2008a), Broekman et al. (2009), Krikorian and Kapczynski (2010), Luke and Hunsinger (2009) and Morozov (2013).

[13] As Tkacz states: ‘Rather than using the open to look forward, there is a need to look more closely at the specific projects that operate under its name—at their details, emergent relations, consistencies, modes of organising and stabilising, points of difference, and forms of exclusion and inclusion’ (2012: 404). For example, Tkacz has been doing this extensively for Wikipedia; see Tkacz and Lovink (2011).

[14] Similarly, diverse ‘schools of thought’ exist in relation to the concept and practice of ‘open science’, as Fecher and Friesike have argued on the basis of an extensive literary analysis (2013).

[15] This coexistence and entanglement of open and secret knowledge right up until the 18th century has been corroborated by historian Paul David, among others (2008: 9).

[16] The same argument can be made with respect to the current method of hierarchisation according to ‘impact factors’ as part of our modern journal system, where ‘indexed’, high impact journals are the journals that will be bought by libraries and others mostly fall by the wayside. As Guédon explains:

No longer was it sufficient to be a good scientist in order to do research; one also had to be part of an institution that could afford to buy the record of the ‘Great Conversation’, i.e. to subscribe to the set of journals defined by SCI. And if one wanted to join the ‘Great Conversation’, simply publishing in a journal recognized as scientific was no longer enough; it had to be a journal included in the SCI set of journals. All the other journals simply disappeared from most radar screens, particular when they could not be ranked according to a new device based on citation counts: the impact factor (IF). (2014: 90–91)

[17] This entanglement of openness and secrecy continued throughout history and is visible, as Vermeir and Margócsy have argued, in the discrepancies between the Mertonian norms of communism and the security concerns of the McCarthy era, as well as in modern biotechnology, a scientific field communicating its findings amid a context of trade secrets and strict confidentiality (2012).

[18] For instance, the protest of diverse groups of humanities scholars in the UK, such as The Council for the Defence of British Universities, The Royal Historical Society, The Political Studies Association, and the editors of 21 history journals attached to the Institute of Historical Research, is directly connected to the implementation of open access in the UK, as set out in the Finch Report, among other places (Boffey 2013, Sabaratnam and Kirby 2012). Also see: http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access

[19] For instance, Holmwood sees this as being imminent in the CC-BY license promoted by RCUK (and Finch), where for him an alternative would be a ‘non-commercial share-alike’ license (2013a).

[20] It does not have to be this way. The OAPEN-NL project, for instance, was heavily involved in experimenting with an author-pays model for books. However, their attempts were accompanied by an extensive study on the costs of monographs, in order to make these prices more transparent and to distinguish costs from profits, to promote a fairer subsidy system (Ferwerda et al. 2013).

[21] As Derrida argues, with respect to deconstruction: ‘If there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural, essential or substantial, that politics exists and ethics is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a chance, and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other’ (2003: 86).

[22] The strategies described above that seek to attain critical mass for open access and to stimulate open access book publishing and accessibility by focusing on print-based values and practices, seem hard to combine with a simultaneous critical reflection on these practices. Conducting experiments with the form of electronic books in the digital age might be hard to do if at the same time we might not want to push too far, as this might risk estranging the average humanities scholar from the open access project.

[23] For example, it can be argued that it’s hard to attribute ownership to a text that is co-written, in a wiki environment for instance. This in turns makes it harder for any of its authors to sell it, as they’d need approval from all others. Which in turns makes it harder for the forces of neoliberalism to privatise and commodify it.