In this paper I want to examine how a group of ‘radical open access’ initiatives

and organisations are currently, as part of their ongoing experiments with

academic publishing and scholarly communication, reconfiguring what research

is and how we can produce, disseminate and consume it. As I will outline more

in detail in what follows, as part of their theoretical and practical interventions,

these initiatives disrupt the concepts of intellectual property, moral ownership

and copyright that underlie and frame the objects of academic publishing:

namely books and their authors. In their publishing experiments they attempt to

move beyond the book as object, research as a singular original endeavour, and

knowledge as something that needs to be fixed down and contained in order to

be shared, or better said, monetised. These radical open access presses intervene

into these publishing practices and discourses in various ways but I will focus

on two related aspects in specific for this paper:

First of all, I will focus on how they are exploring forms of relational and

distributed authorship based on an ethics of care and responsibility, and

secondly I will focus on how they are experimenting with processual and

versioned forms of research and publishing in an attempt to move beyond the

book as a fixed object and commodity.

Before I will discuss these visions and experiments more in detail, I will

however first highlight how the hegemonic model and narrative surrounding

copyright has both in the past and in the current moment categorised and fixed

down both scholars and their research into authors and book-based objects.

From there I will highlight, drawing on new materialists insights, how any

practical and material intervention into this model is simultaneously a discursive

intervention, and vice versa. In other words, these open-ended, experimental

academic writing practices function as material-discursive interventions into the

academic discourse on copyright by questioning and reperforming its

underlying premises.

One of the main critiques of the liberal humanist model of authorship

concerns how it privileges the author as the sole source and origin of creativity.

The argument has been made however, both from a historical perspective and in

relation to todays networked digital environment, that authorship, research and

creativity, are heavily distributed. Yet the authorship construct sees directly

connected to it, in a tightly knit assemblage, copyright and the scholarly work as

object. In this respect, the above criticism notwithstanding, in a liberal vision of

research as something that is proprietory, the typical unit remains either the

author or the work. This ‘solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’

as Foucault has qualified it, albeit challenged, still retains a privileged position.

As Mark Rose argues, authorship—as a relatively recent cultural formation—

can be directly connected to the commodification of writing and to

proprietorship. Even more it developed in tandem with the societal principle of

possessive individualism, in which individual property rights are protected by

the social order.

Although these humanist notions of authorship and copyright—including

the connotations of reputation, individual creativity, ownership, authority,

attribution, and originality they carry—seem to be an integral part of the

scholarly method, despite the fact that they are often critiqued, they are very

hard to overcome. Nonetheless, it is important to continue to challenge these

traditional concepts, discourses, institutions and practices of authorship within

academia.

First of all because these essentialised notions of authorship do not do credit to

the more collaborative, networked and posthuman authorial practices as they

exist currently and have existed in the past, in academia and beyond. Agency is

more complex and distributed than the highly individualist and humanist

narratives accompanying romantic notions of authorship argue for. In this

respect there is an ongoing clash between what Merton has identified as the

values of originality and communism in scholarship. Another reason to

challenge humanist concepts of authorship relates to the function currently

fulfilled by authors in the academic political economy. In an effort to gain

reputation and authority in a scholarly attention economy, academics are

increasingly depicted as being in constant competition with each other (for

positions, impact, funding etc.), where scholars are still rewarded mostly on the

basis of their publication track record, and on their reputation as individual

authors. Academic authors are on the one hand turned into commodities, while

on the other they increasingly need to act as entrepreneurs and marketeers of

their own ‘brand’. This objectification of authorship at a time when ‘unoriginal’

thought, depicted as plagiarism, is heavily combatted and frowned upon, goes

against some of the more distributive and collaborative notions, practices and

discourses of authorship. Yet the latter can be seen to not only be just as

prevalent in contemporary academia, but in many ways a more realistic

depiction of scholarly authorial practices.

Some of the more interesting recent critiques of these constructs of

authorship and proprietorship have come from critical and feminist legal

studies, where scholars such as Carys Craig have started to question these

connections further. As Craig, Turcotte and Coombe point out, copyright,

authorship, the work as object and related discourses around creativity,

continuously re-establish and strengthen each other as part of a self-sustaining

system. We see this with the discourse around creative industries, as part of

which economic value comes to stand in for the creative process itself, which,

according to this narrative, can only be sustained through an IP regime.

Furthermore, from a feminist new materialist position, the current discourse on

authorship is very much a material expression of authorship rather than merely

its representation, where this discourse has been classifying, constructing, and

situating authorship within a neoliberal framework.

Historically there has been a great shift form a valuing of imitation or

derivation to a valuing of originality where it concerns our discourses of what

counts as research or research output. Similar to Rose, Craig, Turcotte and

Coombe argue that the individuality and originality of authorship in its modern

form (established in the 18th century) established a simple route towards

individual ownership and the propertization of creative achievement: the

original work is the author’s ownership whereas the imitator or pirate is a

trespasser of thief. In this sense original authorship is ‘disproportionately valued

against other forms of cultural expression and creative play’, where copyright

upholds, maintains and strengthens the binary between imitator and creator,

which Craig, Turcotte and Coombe define as a ‘moral divide’.

This also presupposes a notion of writing and research that sees authors as

autonomous, living in isolation from each other, ignoring their relationality. Yet

as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, ‘the act of writing involves not

origination, but rather the adaptation, derivation, translation and recombination

of "raw material" taken from previously existing texts’. This position has been

explored extensively from within remix studies and fan culture, where the

adaptation and remixing of cultural content stands at the basis of creativity

(what Lawrence Lessig has called Read/Write culture, opposed to Read/Only

culture). From the perspective of access to culture (instead of ownership of

cultural goods) one could also argue that its value would increase when we are

able to freely distribute it and with that to adapt and remix it to create new

cultural content and with that cultural and social value.

To move beyond Enlightenment ideals of individuation and unity of

author and work, which determine the author-owner in the copyright model,

Craig puts forward a post-structuralist vision of relational authorship. This sees

the individual as socially situated and constituted—based also on feminist

scholarship into the socially situated self—where authorship in this vision is

situated within the communities in which it exists, but also in relationship to the

text and discourses that constitute it. Here creativity takes place from within a

network of social relations and the social dimensions of authorship are

recognized, as connectivity goes hand in hand with individual autonomy. In this

respect Craig argues that copyright should not be defined out of clashing rights

and interests but should instead focus on the kind of relationships this right

would structure, it should be understood in relational terms: ‘it structures

relationships between authors and users, allocating powers and responsibilities

amongst members of cultural communities, and establishing the rules of

communication and exchange’.

Craig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational

authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement, where, as

they state, ‘rather than adhering to the individuated form of authorship that

intellectual property laws presuppose, open access initiatives take into account

varying forms of collaboration, creativity and development’. Yet as scholars

such as Gary Hall, Sarah Kember, myself and others have argued, open access

or open access publishing is not a solid ideological block or model, where it is

made up of disparate groups, visions and ethics. In this sense there is nothing

intrinsically political or democratic about open access. Practitioners of open

access can just as well be seen to support and encourage open access in

connection with the neoliberal knowledge economy, with possessive

individualism and with the unity of author and work.

Nevertheless, there are those within the loosely defined and connected

‘radical open access community’, that do envision their publishing outlook and

relationship towards copyright, openness and authorship within and as part of a

relational ethics of care. Mostly academic-led and centred, this community

experiments with making research available in open access, with new formats

such as liquid monographs, wiki-publications and remixed books, and with the

establishment of new, alternative institutions and practices. They try to

challenge and reconceptualise scholarly communication, whilst experimenting

with and rethinking openness itself. This approach towards openness, exploring

new formats and stimulating sharing and re-use of content, can be seen as a

potentially radical alternative to and a critique of the business ethics underlying

innovations in the knowledge economy whilst at the same time creating strong

alternatives that try to break down the commercial object-formation that has

encompassed the scholarly book, among others by envisioning open access as

an ongoing critical project.

The term radical open access was first introduced by Gary Hall at a talk at

Columbia University, entitled ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ in 2010

and in 2015 the Radical Open Access Conference took place at Coventry

University which brought together a large array of presses and publishing

initiatives (often academic-led) in support of an ‘alternative’ vision of open

access and scholarly communication. Participants of this conference

subsequently formed the loosely allied Radical Open Access collective.

Mattering Press, one of the initiatives that took part in the conference, is a

scholar-led open access book publishing initiative founded in 2012 and

launched in 2016 that publishes in the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Mattering Press works with a production model based on cooperation and

shared scholarship. As part of its publishing politics, ethos and ideology, they

are therefore keen to include various agencies involved in the production of

scholarship, including ‘authors, reviewers, editors, copy editors, proof readers,

typesetters, distributers, designers, web developers and readers’.

They work with two interrelated feminist (new materialist) and STS concepts to

structure and perform this ethos: mattering (Barad 2007) and care (Mol 2008).

Where it concerns mattering, Mattering Press is conscious of how their

experiment in knowledge production, being inherently situated, puts new

relationships and configurations into the world.

What therefore matters for them are not so much the ‘author’ or the ‘outcome’

(the object), but the process and the relationships that make up publishing. For

Mattering Press care is something that extends not only to authors but to the

many other actants involved in knowledge production, who often provide free

volunteer labour within a gift economy context.

As Mattering Press emphasises, the ethics of care ‘mark vital relations and

practices whose value cannot be calculated and thus often goes unacknowledged

where logics of calculation are dominant’. For them care can help offset and

engage with the calculative logic that permeates academic publishing. This

logic of care refers among others to making visible the ‘unseen others’ as Joe

Deville (one of Mattering Press’s editors) calls them, who exemplify the

plethora of hidden labour which goes unnoticed within this object and author-

focused (academic) publishing model. As Endre Danyi, another Mattering Press

editor, remarks, quoting Susan Leigh Star: ‘This is, in the end, a profoundly

political process, since so many forms of social control rely on the erasure or

silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations of the

work’.

The above described more relational notion of rights and the wider

appreciation of the various (posthuman) agencies involved in academic

publishing and communication, based on an ethics of care, challenges the vision

of the single individualised and original author/owner who stands at the basis of

our copyright and IP regime. The other side of the Foucauldian double bind, the

fixed cultural object that functions as a commodity, has however been similarly

critiqued from several angles. As stated before, currently our copyright and

remuneration regime is based on ownership of cultural objects. Yet as many

have already made clear, this regime and discourse is very much based on

physical objects and on a print-based situation. As such the idea of ‘text’ has not

been sufficiently problematised as versioned, processual and materially

changing within an IP context. In other words, text and works are mostly

perceived as fixed and stable objects and commodities instead of material and

creative processes and entangled relationalities. In opposition to a more

relational perspective, the current copyright regime views culture through a

proprietary lens. And it is very much this discursive positioning, or as Craig et

al. argue ‘the language of "ownership," "property," and "commodity"’, which

‘obfuscates the nature of copyright's subject matter, and cloaks the social and

cultural conditions of its production and the implications of its protection’. How

can we approach research in context, as socially and culturally situated, and not

as the free-standing, stable product of a transcendent author, which is very much

how it is being positioned within an economic and copyright framework? This

hegemonic conception of research as property fails to acknowledge or take into

consideration the manifold, distributed, derivative and messy realities of

research and culture.

Published on an open-source wiki platform, Living Books about Life is a series

of open access books about life published by Open Humanities Press, an

international open access publishing initiative in the humanities, specializing in

critical and cultural theory, also a member or the radical open access collective.

All the books in this series repackage existing open access science-related

research, supplementing this with an original editorial essay to tie the collection

together. They also provide additional multimedia material, from videos to

podcasts to whole books. With this series Open Humanities Press wants to

highlight that authorship is collaborative and even often anonymous, where with

the publishing of research in wikis they aim to further complicate the focus on a

static marketable book object within academia

Being published online on a wiki platform means that the books are ‘open on a

read/write basis for users to help compose, edit, annotate, translate and remix’.

As Gary Hall, one of the initiators of the project has argued, this project

amongst others wants to challenge the physical and conceptual limitations of the

traditional codex by emphasizing its duration by publishing in a wiki and thus

‘rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavor’. Hall argues

that wikis offer a potential to question and critically engage issues of

authorship, work and stability. They can offer increased accessibility and induce

participation from contributors from the periphery. As he states, ‘wiki-

communication can enable us to produce a multiplicitous academic and

publishing network, one with a far more complex, fluid, antagonistic,

distributed, and decentred structure, with a variety of singular and plural, human

and non-human actants and agents’.

Our scholarly publishing and communication practices currently function within

an object-based neoliberal capitalist system: a system that is fed and sustained

by the idea of autonomous ownership of a work, copyright (mostly going to

publishers), and a reputation economy based on individualised authors. In this

respect, an exploration of more distributed and collaborative notions of

authorship, as well as of forms of anti-authorship critique, might help us take

attention away from the scholarly work as a product and the book as an

academic commodity. This might potentially stimulate re-use and more

processual forms of research. Similarly, it might promote a move towards

envisioning the production of research as a process in which a variety of actants

play a role, both in the production, dissemination and consumption of that

research. To some extent both Craig’s relational model and the model proposed

by for example legal scholar Johanna Gibson, who wants to adapt and expand

copyright by focusing on more networked notions of creativity, are reformist

and responsive where it concerns copyright, seeking to expand this concept and

making it more inclusive. Here copyright still comes first. What is interesting

about these radical open access experiments is that their focus is first and

foremost on the relationalities of publishing, on our practices as researchers,

reconfiguring these based on an ethics of care, a continued questioning of

established institutions and an openness to change and becoming. These notions

are central and challenge any copyrights model which remains inexcruciably

tied up with ownership and authorship of a research object and with the

commodification and corporatisation of knowledge, research and thought.