[ecrea] conference Radical Open Access II - The Ethics of Care

 Radical Open Access II – The Ethics of Care
Two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse and 
equitable future for open access
The Post Office
Coventry University
June 26-27 2018
Organised by Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities 
research centre The Post Office, a project of the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures
Find out more at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/roa2/
Attendance and participation is free of charge but registration is 
mandatory. Register 
here:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/radical-open-access-ii-the-ethics-of-care-tickets-44796943865

Co-curators: Culture Machine, Mattering Press, Memory of the 
World/Public Library, meson press, Open Humanities Press, punctum books, POP
Speakers: Denisse Albornoz, Janneke Adema, Laurie Allen, Angel Octavio 
Alvarez Solís, Bodó Balázs, Kirsten Bell, George Chen, Jill Claassen, 
Joe Deville, Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Eileen Joy, Chris 
Kelty, Christopher Long, Kaja Marczewska, Frances McDonald, Gabriela 
Méndez-Cota, Samuel Moore, Tahani Nadim, Christopher Newfield, Sebastian 
Nordhoff, Lena Nyahodza, Alejandro Posada, Reggie Raju, Václav Štětka, 
Whitney Trettien
Radical Open Access II is about developing an ethics of care. Care with 
regard to:

    our means of creating, publishing and communicating research;
    our working conditions;
    our relations with others.

Radical Open Access II aims to move the debate over open access on from 
two issues in particular:
THE QUESTION OF ACCESS. At first sight it may seem rather odd for a 
conference on open access to want to move on from this question. But as 
Sci-Hub, aaaarg, libgen et al. show, the debate over access has largely 
been won by shadow-libraries, who are providing quick and easy access to 
vast amounts of published research. Too much of the debate over 
‘legitimate’ forms of open access now seems to be about how to use the 
provision of access to research as a means of exercising forms of 
governmental and commercial control (via audits, metrics, discourses of 
transparency and so on).
THE OA MOVEMENT’S RELUCTANCE TO ENGAGE RIGOROUSLY WITH THE KIND OF 
CONCERNS THAT ARE BEING DISCUSSED ELSEWHERE IN SOCIETY. This includes 
climate change, the environment, and the damage that humans are doing to 
the planet (i.e. the Anthropocene). But it also takes in debates over 
different forms:

    of organising labour (e.g. platform cooperativism);
    of working – such as those associated with ideas of post-work, the 
sharing and gig economies, and Universal Basic Income;
    of being together – see the rise of interest in the Commons, and in 
experiments with horizontalist, leaderless ways of self-organizing such 
as those associated with the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Dakota 
Standing Rock Sioux protests.

Background
In 2015 the inaugural international Radical Open Access Conference 
addressed an urgent question: how should we set about reclaiming open 
access from its corporate take-over, evident not least in the rise of 
A/BPC models based on the charging of exorbitant, unaffordable and 
unsustainable publishing fees from scholars and their institutions? The 
conference saw participants calling for the creation of new forms of 
communality, designed to support the building of commons-based open 
access publishing infrastructures, and promote a more diverse, 
not-for-profit eco-system of scholarly communication. With these calls 
in mind, the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) was formed 
immediately following the 2015 conference as a horizontal alliance 
between like-minded groups dedicated to the sharing of skills, tools and 
expertise. Since then it has grown to a community of over 40 
scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other projects. The 
members of this alliance are all invested in reimaging publishing. And 
what’s more, are committed to doing so in a context where debates over 
access—which in many respects have been resolved by the emergence of 
shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub—are increasingly giving way to concerns 
over the commercial hegemony of academic publishing. So much so that the 
issue addressed by the 2015 conference—how can open access be taken back 
from its corporate take-over? —now seems more urgent than ever.

In June 2018, Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities 
research centre, The Post Office, will convene a second Radical Open 
Access conference, examining the ways in which open access is being 
rendered further complicit with neoliberalism’s audit culture of 
evaluation, measurement, impact and accountability. Witness the way open 
access has become a top-down requirement - quite literally a ‘mandate’ – 
rather than a bottom-up scholar-led movement for change. Taking as its 
theme The Ethics of Care, the concern of this second conference will be 
on moving away from those market-driven incentives that are frequently 
used to justify open access, to focus instead on the values that 
underpin many of the radical open access community’s experiments in open 
publishing and scholarly communication. In particular, it will follow 
the lead of Mattering Press, a founding member of the ROAC, in exploring 
how an ethics of care can help to counter the calculative logic that 
otherwise permeates academic publishing.

What would a commitment to more ethical forms of publishing look like? 
Would such an ethics of care highlight the importance of:

    Making publishing more diverse and equitable - geographically, but 
also with respect to issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality?
    Nurturing new and historically under-represented cultures of 
knowledge - those associated with early career, precariously employed 
and para-academics, or located outside the global North and West?
    Ensuring everyone is able to have a voice – not least those writing 
on niche or avant-garde topics or who are conducting hybrid, multimodal, 
post-literary forms of research, and who are currently underserved by 
our profit-focused commercial publishing system?

Indeed, for many members of the ROAC, a commitment to ethics entails 
understanding publishing very much as a complex, multi-agential, 
relational practice, and thus recognising that we have a responsibility 
to all those involved in the publishing process. Caring for the 
relationships involved throughout this process is essential, from 
rewarding or otherwise acknowledging people fairly for their labour, 
wherever possible, to redirecting our volunteer efforts away from 
commercial profit-driven entities in favour of supporting more 
progressive not-for-profit forms of publishing. But it also includes 
taking care of the nonhuman: not just the published object itself, but 
all those animals, plants and minerals that help to make up the 
scholarly communication eco-system.

Radical Open Access II is community-driven, and is being co-organised 
and co-curated by various members of the ROAC in a collaborative manner. 
It includes panels on topics as diverse as: Predatory Publishing; The 
Geopolitics of Open; Competition and Cooperation; Humane Metrics/Metrics 
Noir; Guerrilla Open Access; The Poethics of Scholarship; and Care for 
the Commons. The conference is free to attend and will also be live 
streamed for those who are unable to be there in person.
---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------