Reassembling Scholarly Communications

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities.

he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.

Part I: Colonial Influences Chapter 1. Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon
Chapter 2. Scholarly Communications and Social Justice
Chapter 3. Social Justice and Inclusivity: Drivers for the Dissemination of African Scholarship
Chapter 4. Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?
Part II: Epistemologies
Chapter 5. When the Law Advances Access to Learning: Locke and the Origins of Modern Copyright
Chapter 6. How Does a Format Make a Public?
Chapter 7. Peer Review: Readers in the Making of Scholarly Knowledge
Chapter 8. The Making of Empirical knowledge: Recipes, Craft, and Scholarly Communication
Part III: Publics and Politics
Chapter 9. The Royal Society and the Non-Commercial Circulation of Knowledge
Chapter 10. The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge
Chapter 11. Libraries and their Publics in the United States
Chapter 12. Open Access, 'Publicity', and Democratic Knowledge
Part IV: Archives and Preservation
Chapter 13. Libraries, Museums, and Archives as Speculative Knowledge Infrastructure
Chapter 14. Preserving the Past for the Future: Whose Past? Everyone's Future
Chapter 15. Is There a Text in These Data? The Digital Humanities and Preserving the Evidence
Chapter 16. Accessing the Past, or Should Archives Provide Open Access?
Part V: Infrastructures and Platforms
Chapter 17. Infrastructural Experiments and the Politics of Open Access
Chapter 18. The Platformization of Open
Chapter 19. Reading Scholarship Digitally
Chapter 20. Towards Linked Open Data for Latin America
Chapter 21. The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO Part VI: Global Communities
Chapter 22. Not Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation: Open Access and the Ethics of Care
Chapter 23. Towards A Global Open-Access Scholarly Communications System
Chapter 24. Learned Societies, Humanities Publishing, and Scholarly Communication in the UK
Chapter 25. Not all Networks: Toward Open, Sustainable Research CommunitiesMartin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University.

Jonathan Gray is a Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University.

Jonathan Gray is a Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

John Willinsky is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED and a developer of Open Journals Systems software.

Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of We Have Never Been Modern, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia, Down to Earth, and many other books. He coedited (with Peter Weibel) the previous ZKM volumes Making Things Public, ICONOCLASH, and Reset Modernity! (all published by the MIT Press).

Jonathan Gray is a Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University.