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Samuel Moore, "Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Sorry.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
1-800-Contacts.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Steven Pinfield
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host Steven Pinfield and today I'm talking to Dr. Samuel Moore about his recent book Publishing beyond the Open Care and the Commons, published by the University of Michigan Press in September 2025. Samuel Moore is the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Libraries in the uk, Associate Lecturer at Cambridge Digital Humanities and College Research Associate at King's College, Cambridge. In his book, Sam argues that the move to open access should focus less on the accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. By deploying theoretical literature on science and technology studies, care ethics and the commons, the book critically interrogates open access and reimagines a more ethical future for research led publishing. A case study of Plan S, the multi funder European Policy for Open Access Publishing, explores its tendency to rehearse all the failures of commercialization through critical engagement with the open access landscape. The book reveals the shortcomings of market centric and policy based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism and private control of publishing and going forward. The book explores the importance of collectivity and democratic governance within the transition to open access publishing. It suggests that developing a commons based, scholar led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketized systems of open access and subscription publishing. In weaving themselves together in order to scale small, these publishing initiatives would act as a counter hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care. By illustrating how these projects build toward a commons based publishing future and how they may complement other approaches to publishing or within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision. Sam's book, which I'm glad to say is available as an open access ebook alongside the paperback, is the subject of our conversation today. Samuel Moore, welcome to the podcast.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Thanks very much for having me.
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Steven Pinfield
So Sam, we're going to be digging into your book in just a moment, but before we do that, let's paint some background. The book is about open access, so perhaps you could say something about what open access is and what first got you interested in open access and motivated you to write the book.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, that's a great question. So open access has quite a rich history now, but the way I frame it, I sort of locate the beginnings of open access in the early 2000s with what's sort of an official declaration by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. And they were responding to a number of different things that were going on at that time. There was the sort of rapid adoption of digital technologies, the kind of the fact that publishing and journal prices were rapidly increasing above inflation. And just looking at those conditions and thinking actually we, we can respond to the situations by making stuff open access, by giving free access to people. And they framed it around a really kind of a public good for humanity, something that would be kind of, I think they said to share the knowledge of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich. And they were really kind of into that sort of idea. And so open access as it was was an idealistic idea and it was rapidly adopted by funders and by governments and by institutions and researchers as well. And sort of what happened with it then it became one of the dominant models of publishing. And it really is hard to overstate just how much open access has transformed the academic publishing landscape over the last 15, 20 years. And now, for the most part, most articles will be made open access, which is to say freely accessible to anyone with a stable Internet connection. That's kind of what the idea is. There's a lot of diversity within that movement. Open access is not one big project that's being rolled out. There are lots of people who are interested in it for a variety of different reasons, and they have a variety of different conditions. But ultimately it means sort of free accessibility of knowledge. And so what happened with that and why I was motivated to kind of write the book is because that promise, it kind of fell flat a little bit. As much as we had this really interesting and exciting period where open access was being adopted left right and centre and funders were enabling it and people were saying, let's get into that. At the same time there was a situation in which the same commercial actors that we were responding to through open access were just able to control open access in the same way through what was called article processing charges and through transformative agreements. And those things mean. So an article processing charge is something which researchers would pay to the publisher, often totaling kind of a couple of thousand pounds to make the work open access. And they realized that's a good model for making stuff, for making money, actually. And then in doing that, they kind of changed their subscription models to these things called transformative agreements that tie in the cost of publishing with the cost of access. And so publishers rapidly became really incentivized to publish as many articles as possible. It meant that they are really incentivized to. To base their models on high input, high volume and scale. And what that meant is they were less concerned with actually having humans kind of review the whole thing. It was trying to push as much of the labor for publishing onto different actors which they weren't paying. So that could be automation, it could be overseas kind of poorly paid labor, or it could just be working academics. And all of these things has meant that essentially the, that we have a lot more access to materials, which is fantastic, but at the expense of the continual commercial control of academic publishing. So it's a kind of. It was what started out as an optimistic movement. There's still lots of optimism around. It's not wholly kind of co opted by commercial publishers, but for the most part they were able to sort of to usurp it, really. So that's kind of where the book starts, really.
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Steven Pinfield
Okay, thank you for that. Why does this matter to you? In particular, what's your motivation for writing the book?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
So the book came out of my PhD and I was very interested at the time at looking at open access policies and what open access policies were doing in, particularly in the uk, what their kind of impacts were. And the UK government was a very early adopter of open access. They're very interested in it. They had this thing called the Finch Report that recommended that essentially we should move from subscription publishing to open access and we should do that via article processing charges. And they were really interested in this idea that if you give researchers money to publish in different places, they will become essentially economic. They will do it on an economic basis. They will be able to make price sensitive decisions based on kind of who's going to offer the best value for money in practice. That obviously doesn't work because they weren't spending their money, they were spending someone else's money. So all they were doing was going for the most prestigious press that was out there. And so, so I was looking at the situation and at the same time I have a background in the humanities and social sciences, which initially wasn't served by the turn to open access. It was very much an STM thing, a science or a scientific thing really, at least how it was being presented. And I became very interested in actually what was going on in the humanities and if we could see that as something of a counterpoint to these big sort of policy led, science led approaches to open access. So the PhD itself was looking at the kind of the top down and the bottom up and sort of contrasting the two. And I really was just interested in how we can both think about open access from a sort of critical theory lens and at the same time how we might be able to sort of explore open access and how it works for humanities and social science disciplines. In the end, the book became not just about humanities and social science. Publishing is much broader than that, but that's kind of really where the interest took off. I'm very much interested in how things around open access can lead to new forms of organization, new ways of doing publishing, and actually make an argument for the humanities in a way that actually we really need right now. So it's just as much interested in open access as it is humanities and social science publishing and disciplines themselves.
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Steven Pinfield
Okay, so thanks for that. So we're dealing with the publications that arise from research projects and it's a strange market, isn't it, as you've implied, because it's one where the authors themselves don't make any money from it. They don't get royalties for their publications. Rather, the publication process is seen as part of their research and disseminating their work is part of their research to in the first instance their fellow researchers in their same field, but also potentially beyond that as well. And we'll maybe get into some of the dynamics of the market as we go through. But there are several elements to your analysis which are summarized in the subtitle Open Access, Care and the Commons. And so you've already said something about the first of these, Open access. Perhaps we could now go on to unpack the other key concepts and discuss their relationship with open access. So I'd like us to deal with the idea of the Commons first, if we may. Tell us what you're talking about when you talk about the Commons.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, so the Commons itself has sort of an equally interesting lineage to open access, in the sense that around the same time that open access was a thing, it was becoming a thing. People were also looking to the Commons and they were saying that the Commons has this connotation of freely accessible stuff, that we can give people things that they can access, and you can't exclude anyone on the basis for any good reason, really. And so open access in the Commons became quite associated. And so we have things like Wikipedia is often considered a Commons or Creative Commons, being a way of licensing resources that you can then access. And so in the sort of mid 2000s, was a really kind of burgeoning discourse that was being rolled out, I guess, within sort of digital culture circles. And I sort of look at that history and think, actually they kind of got that wrong a little bit, that they're talking about the Commons as a sort of. As a thing that everyone can access. Now, if you were to look in the actual literature of what the Commons means or Common pool resources, that's not really how it's used specifically, It's a lot more nuanced than that. And so rather than being about, in this case, free access to publications, I don't consider that in itself a Commons. What I consider a Commons to be is something that is managed and it's sort of supported by a particular community. Now, the resource itself is really, really important. So the common pool resource is, of course, an important thing, but you can't have an understanding of the Commons without an understanding of the commoners, which is the community, the people who are maintain and sharing that resource. And then practices of commoning, which I think are probably the most important practices in the discussion of the Commons, which is the sort of rules for engagement, the norms for engagement, the ways in which the community resolves its conflicts, and all those sorts of things. And so if you were to look at academic publishing, if you look at that through the lens of the Commons, those early Commons advocates on the Web, like Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle, they would talk about that the Commons is Open access, it's just open access to literature. But I say actually no, a better way of thinking about it is kind of communities that produce their own knowledge. And so you might think of it more as like a journal is a better way of thinking about a commons than the actual endpoint, the actual article itself. And a journal gathers a group of people together, a community. Some people are in that community, some people aren't, for whatever reason that might be. And there are, there are bad forms of exclusion, there are good forms of exclusion. But essentially a community is a defined thing with boundaries and they work together and they produce new knowledge. They are to that extent a sort of a community of commoners that are producing knowledge. Now I want to be able to use that logic to say that the things that they produce should be openly accessible. But if you forget about the ways in which knowledge is produced, as I think the open access movement did, then you end up with a bunch of companies controlling all of the landscape in the same way that they did before open access. So it's really crucial to think about the commons is a form of production. It's not a form of access and it's a form of production. That means communities do it themselves. They're self reliant in a way that's not the same as the kind of the market, like the way that we produce things privately or the state publicly. It's the sort of a third way between the two of those things. And so that's kind of what I try to do is sort of chart what that looks like for open access throughout the book.
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Steven Pinfield
Okay, so just to clarify around the idea of the commons, the commons is often associated with depletable resources, isn't it? And you get this idea of the tragedy of the commons, where because a resource is open, then it's vulnerable to over consumption. Does that apply here at all to knowledge?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Well, I think that that's why people were looking at digital resources in that kind of commons way, because actually it doesn't really apply. If you have a digital resource, it can be infinitely copyable and it doesn't deplete upon you. So that's why they made the argument that essentially the public can access it and we don't have to exclude anyone, which I mean, yeah, that's fine, we don't have to exclude people from digital materials. But if you look at the form of production as the sort of the commons, then actually, yeah, it is kind of depletable. It's people who are doing work, it's people who are kind of coming together and there's not an infinite amount of labor there. And so that's sort of why it's a better way of thinking about it, I think, because you need to have sort of forms of just boundaries to make the whole process understandable. And so, and so that's kind of why, I mean, we draw heavily on kind of the work of Eleanor Ostrom, I guess, in the Commons, who was sort of the very famous Nobel prize winning economist. And she would say kind of exactly that. A lot of her work was looking at the Digital Commons, but still so many of the same issues remain. If you're looking at it as in communities, managing, managing things, it just means that the actual output at the end of the day is non exclusible to a real extent. Yeah. Okay.
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Steven Pinfield
Now you criticize, as you've already mentioned, some other ideas of the Commons and and it has, as you say, become quite a common, common idea associated with open access. You associate some of these uses of Commons theory with liberal ideas of the commons. Could you just maybe say a little bit more about where you see those as problematic?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, I mean, I think a good example of that would be the Creative Commons organization. Now, Creative Commons has really strong resonance with the open access movement. Movement in the sense that governments and funders worldwide are asking researchers to say to apply a Creative Commons license to their work. Often the most liberal of these licenses, and I mean liberal in the sense of freedom. The CC by license, which allows people to essentially do what you want with it as long as the original author is attributed. So already we have this kind of liberal connotation of authorship with that, which is that the individual author is still completely in control of their intellectual property and it is still viewed as intellectual property. Now, if you're thinking about the commons in this kind of collective ownership of something that doesn't really make sense actually that it's not really the best way of thinking about intellectual property. If it's a collective good. If I'm giving something to the commons, then it's not mine, it wasn't mine to begin with. But at least if I'm giving it to them, then I should really give it to the collective. And so Creative Commons doesn't really enable that. And what it does do is, I mean, a lot of the stuff they talked about, particularly when they were kind of getting going in the sort of mid 2000s, was how creative Commons works could allow for a sort of a kind of a brand that you as an author are a brand and you get to, and you can make money off your work in this way. It's a good way of being an entrepreneur. And so, and so I'm kind of less interested, I guess, in those sort of, they are kind of liberal ideas, but they're also sort of almost not neoliberal ideas that they are essentially encouraging people to become sort of entrepreneurs and to say if you share things in certain ways, you can do it in a way that allows you to sort of preserve your kind of entrepreneurial nature or something like that. And so I was never really convinced by Creative Commons being the main thing. Lots of people in the humanities and social sciences don't like Creative Commons because they're worried that people are going to kind of steal from them or kind of plagiarize them or do stuff that they don't want with them. But I look at it from the other angle and I think actually what that does is it sort of enforces an idea of intellectual property, which I think ideas of the commons probably should be getting away from anyway. We should be thinking about intellectual property in this more global or more community based sense of it's not something owned by an individual, but it's sort of collective conversation.
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Steven Pinfield
I'm interested in the implications of this for the idea of authorship. Because one of the features of scholarly communication, publication of research outputs, as we've said, is that authors don't tend to make money from their own publications. They give them away as part of their research work to be disseminated as widely as possible. But what they do accrue is recognition. It's a recognition or a reputation economy, as it's been said. So although you'd expect what you're saying to kind of resonate with authors in the sense that they're not making money so they can give away their work as part of their research, they do want to gain something which is for their work to be attributed to them. Are you saying that is also something which ought to be re examined or are you still assuming this reputational recognition economy?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
I mean, I think I am still assuming it and I think that it's inescapable. And I'm definitely not making the argument that we should just abandon intellectual property completely because it's bad and we should not claim any kind of ownership over certain kind of intellectual works or ideas. That's not really what I'm saying. It's more because that just wouldn't work. We live in a particular kind of society where we need to get credit for certain things. And of course people have tried to sort of expand the ways in which we get credit. I don't think academic credit is in any way a good system. I don't think applying kind of authorship to people and then excluding the people who may have supported the work as sort of non authors. I think it's quite a binary way of looking at it. But ultimately, yeah, I don't really talk much in the book about how we should be sort of undoing that kind of structure at all. So I'm very much kind of happy for that to continue. But at the same time my theoretical commitments really are that we should be problematizing a lot of this stuff and particularly people who are writing in these traditions, in writing in the kind of critical theory tradition where oftentimes they will just publish 150 quid book with a commercial publisher and slap their name as the author. And they'll have created a copyright according to them, attributable to them. And then they'll go on a sort of 80,000 word kind of treatise around why we should be getting rid of intellectual property. So it's kind of. I'd like people to think about the ways in which they publish and the ways in which they sort of enter into those forms of credit which are in many ways not good kind of structures, like I say. But it's not something I dwell upon hugely. But I just think if you were to look at sort of Creative Commons in particular, it comes out of a sort of a much more commercially minded, sort of commercially friendly mindset that I'm kind of comfortable with.
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Steven Pinfield
So we've introduced open access and we've talked through some of the key features of the Commons. So let's move on now to this idea of care that's quite prominent in your book and the ethics of care. So what role does that play in your analysis? Why is it important?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
So I'm helpful that we. I'm glad that we introduced the Commons first because I think that care really fits with that practice of commoning which I just said. So commoning is the sort of. The ways that we relate to one another, the ways that we sort of support ourselves with respect to our situations and our resources. And care is. It comes from. I mean, it's been theorized for many different theoretical traditions, but particularly sort of feminist ethics is very interested in care. And it's about how we sort of maintain the situation, situations that we are in, how we maintain our relationships and how we think about things in a less objectifying way. And we support kind of people and non humans as well in their situational endeavours. Now what that means in practice from a sort of a publishing angle is that publishing itself, I argue, is a form of care. It's really, really important in publishing to take care of the process and that means taking care of the labour that is sort of going into the publishing. There's taking care of things like the copy editing and the actual argumentative structures, the people you're working with yourself, all these things are actually really, really important within publishing. Publishing is inextricably a practice of care. And actually that care is no longer found within the commercial publishing industry and what we see time and time again, particularly the big commercial journal publishers, where they're so incentivized to automate everything and to make everything look the same, that's really the antithesis of a careful approach to publishing. They're trying to sort of funnel things through their cookie cutter processes in a way that just means we don't have to sort of diverge our processes for anything. Everything has to fit through what we want. And so then authors kind of lose agency because they're no longer allowed to say, actually I really would like to be able to present my work in a different way. I'D like to be able to have a different idea of authorship or presentation or all these sorts of things. But because we have this kind of careless approach to publishing within commercial publishing, they just can't do it. And all of that is driven by commercial outcomes. And so care and commercialization really don't fit very well together. And there's lots and lots of things that people have theorized kind of care, actual health care within commercial environments, and why that doesn't work either. So people like Anne Marie Moll, who I draw on quite heavily in the book, and she writes about sort of the logic of care and in contrast, the logic of choice. And so if you're sick and you're entering into a healthcare system that prioritizes patient choice over patient care, what that is is a commercial thing. You're given sort of a choice between certain forms of healthcare which, which may or may not respond to your situation. It's about giving people kind of agency in that regard. But actually it's a kind of false agency because they're only given two or three options. And so real, good, adequate care just doesn't find itself sitting very well within a commercial environment because care is indeterminate, it's difficult. It's not something that can be sort of heterogeneous as well. It's not something that can be funneled through any kind of process. And so I'm really interested in that idea of care. And I think because I talk so much about community within the book, those two things kind of naturally interlink is that you have care within the community, within the situation, looking out for one another, mutual reliance. And all those things sit really, really well in a Mode of production I.e. the Commons, as opposed to a sort of more commercial mode of production.
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Steven Pinfield
So we'll come back, I think, to how all of this fits together in some of the solutions or responses to the current environment that you propose. But at the center of your book is an interesting and somewhat controversial critique of one of the major policy initiatives in this whole area, Plan S. So you're responding to what you regard as some of the major problems in this area around marketization. And you talk about Plan S somewhat controversially, as a careless policy intervention, although you've helped contextualise what you mean by that. But perhaps you could say explicitly to kind of ground your critique, what was wrong with Plan S? It was, I think, recognized to be very significant and impactful in moving along the open access agenda, at least in certain directions. So what was wrong with it? What is wrong with it.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah. So Plan S was a sort of multi funder initiative that was set up in the sort of mid 2010s to stimulate or to require their authors, anyone funded by this group of funders would have to publish open access under a Creative Commons license. It has to be immediate. And they had various conditions associated with that. And at the time it was quite a radical vision because what they initially said is we are going to sort of demand certain conditions from publishers. And one of their first things they wanted to do was have a cap on the price of article processing charges. That was really the big splash they made is that we want to force publishers to charge no more than X amount of money for, for article processing charges. Now that in itself was quite radical actually, and it would have been quite an interesting thing had they have done that. It turns out that there was a lot of pushback from the publishing industry and also from kind of learned societies and those sorts of people, because they were saying, actually you can't force us to charge a certain amount of money and you can't force us to publish in certain ways. And so what they had to do is kind of water down the plan slightly and they made money available for researchers to publish open access. And what that did was really stimulate a market that hitherto hadn't really existed in the way that it had done. And so journals really started charging up article processing charges and they were charging quite heavily as well. They were saying there's money available, so therefore we're going to try and take that. And so what I do within the book is I look at that through the lens of another book that was published a couple of years ago now, maybe three or four years ago, by Robert Jan Smits, who was the sort of chief architect of Plan S. And in fact the S of Plan S stands for Smitz. So it's Plan Smitz. It was his kind of idea. He's very proud of it. And I kind of look at kind of how he describes the creation of this plan and how he talks about it as a sort of a radical thing. But at the same time he says, actually, you know what, it's not the job of policymakers to intervene into the economics of the market. Actually. We have to just let the market run its course. We can request certain conditions and all we can do really is hope that authors make good sort of price sensitive decisions that will allow them a good market to flourish. And so what was sort of billed as kind of radical, actually it was just completely the definition of neoliberal policymaking, the definition being that neoliberal policymaking wants to create market outcomes wherever it can. And so what was actually needed in the publishing industry, I mean we haven't actually said yet, but the publishing industry is a very kind of strange industry that's controlled by kind of five or six big publishers. They control the majority of the market and then lots of smaller publishers too. And so it requires actual, at least regulation or some sort of intervention for it to function well. But actually there's this sort of policymaker saying this market's bad, but we can't do anything about it, but we can free up a load of money for people to publish in the ways that they want to. And so of course what then happened was publishers wanted to get that money. They're commercially motivated actors, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to make that money. And they did that. And so lots of articles were published and lots of money was made available for that. And that kind of problem still exists today. Now planet aren't completely responsible for it. Commercial publishers were the ones who were sort of changing their business models to suit this new environment. But at the same time they actually kind of, they could really have intervened in a much better way. And so I critique Plan S really the sort of the failings of it because it just didn't live up to expectations. And it just meant that academics were told that they had to publish in certain ways and there was no reason for them to think about why they're publishing open access. They were just doing it because they were given enough funding to actually go and, and publish oa. And so what's needed is something kind of better than that. And it turns out that Coalition S has taken stock of their approach and more recently they are moving into a better direction that takes into account the actual economics of publishing and moving to things like diamond open access where people don't have to pay to access or to submit to the journal. So it's those sorts of things. But, but maybe the damage has already been done, we're not too sure. And maybe this thing is never going to be something that we can kind of rein in.
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Steven Pinfield
So is it the policy based approach to open access which is problematic, or was it the particular policies of Plan S or whatever policy you referred to earlier on to policies of the research cancers in the UK following the Finch report? Is it the particular terms of the policies or is it the policy making itself which is problematic?
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Dr. Samuel Moore
Well, I mean I can completely see a good top down, like the possibility of a good top down approach to open access. And that exists in Latin America, for instance, where you have silo and places where the government has freed up funding through institutions to support a really rich ecosystem of academic publishing. Now that I think is something which is which I mean it should be copied, it should be replicated everywhere. It's a really, really good system. So I'm not against top down approaches per se, but what I'm trying to show is that top down approaches within kind of global northern context or within neoliberal contexts necessarily rehearse the failures of neoliberalism. They have to as policymakers, their toolbox only contains things that stimulate markets. That's all they can do because that's essentially what neoliberalism is. And so I've always been kind of really wary as a sort of an advocate for what you might call more radical forms of open access with kind of getting into bed with policymakers and saying this is good stuff. Because at the end of the day it doesn't deal with the root cause which is the marketization of academic publishing. It's an industry that has been massively marketised in the last sort of 40 years from something that was previously kind of learned society driven or nonprofit institutionally driven to something that was privatized and now is a multi billion dollar industry that is very difficult to kind of get on top of. So I'm not per se against policy and I can see a role for policy, but it's just something which, the ways in which the ideological kind of makeup of these funders, it does really mean they have to act in that kind of way. And so I'm just looking at what the consequences that are, I suppose.
- [38:37]
Steven Pinfield
Yeah.
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Steven Pinfield
Phew.
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Dr. Samuel Moore
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Dr. Samuel Moore
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- [39:40]
Commercial Narrator
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- [40:09]
Steven Pinfield
Okay, so let's move on now to think about some of the more radical solutions that you propose in your book in response to these problems. So you focus on what you call in the book book Scholar Led Publishing. So could you tell us about why you believe that approach to academic publishing is worth pursuing, what it is, what it looks like, and how it addresses the problems that you've outlined in the book?
- [40:39]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, so I mean, Scholar led publishing really does mean sort of how I'm using it in quite a specific sense actually, where it's publications that are entirely managed by working academics and those are sort of disciplinary experts often but not always based in university, and they tend to kind of get together and they publish and they see it as a kind of an extension of their research and a sort of commitment to their discipline. And what I do within the book is illustrate that actually Scholar led publishing and Scholar led open access was a thing before the open access movement in the early 90s. We have these journals like Surfaces and Postmodern Culture and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. These were all really cool Scholar led journals on the early web. And they as editorial collectives thought actually yeah, we can use digital technologies to do this ourselves and to do it in a way that doesn't rely on big commercial networks and actually allows us to kind of publish for the reasons that we want to. And so that kind of was a very early kind of approach to scholarly publishing. And there's always continued it's always been a reasonably niche thing within academic publishing. And so I am I guess the co organizer of a group of presses called the Radical Open Access Collective. And so I'm interested in it from that perspective. And the Radical Open Access Collective is a sort of a loosely affiliated member organization of about 80 presses. And we bring them together and the idea is to sort of share resources, to share kind of expertise, to build mutual reliance and to build a kind of something like a distinct voice for radical open access for Radical forms of open access that aren't just commercial, that aren't kind of beholden to all those things that we've just discussed. And so scholar led publishing, I'm not in any way making the argument that all academics need to go out and be publishers. That's very far away from the argument I'm making. But I am saying there's lots of value in what they're doing because they point to, to a non commercial and actually a commons based way of approaching publishing because they are individual communities, they're mutually reliant, they're producing stuff that's open access, but essentially they're doing so in this kind of commons based way, as little commercial kind of incentives as possible and actually with very little help from the state as well. So it's very much sitting in between that market and state, as I mentioned. And so that, that is a really nice counterpoint to the big commercial networks that don't prioritize things like care and community leadership and all that sort of stuff. And so I identify that as a sort of distinct ecosystem, one that we should support. It's not going to be the thing that fixes publishing, but it's a really nice kind of alternative. And so I'm really interested in building those kinds of alternatives in lots of different places. So it could be be scholar led publishing, it could be library led publishing, where libraries are doing the same kind of thing and they're hosting journals and they're supporting academics in that way, or it could be university press publishing. Well, obviously there's a really rich tradition of university press publishing in North America. But in the UK too, with the last 15 years, with the sort of advent of open access from the UK government giving us money, lots of new university presses have been founded that are open access and they are subsidized by their host institutions. So again, they don't have to rely purely on commercial models to sustain themselves, they're subsidized so they can do things a bit differently. And so when you look at this ecosystem of the libraries, the university presses, the scholar led publishers, then it starts to be a bit interesting. You go, actually this is kind of cool. We've got this sort of slight alternative here that is different to commercial publishing. And so I'm just interested not in how that can kind of take over academic publishing, but how it can be supported just to give people an alternative, I suppose.
- [44:45]
Steven Pinfield
And do you think it applies to all disciplines? We've mentioned before that all disciplines communicate about their research findings, although they traditionally do so in somewhat different ways there are disciplinary differences, aren't there? Is the solution that you're proposing appropriate for all disciplines or just the humanity?
- [45:05]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Well, no, I mean, I think I talk a lot about the humanities just because the radical open access collective is primarily a humanities and social science organization. But the same things are going on within STEM fields and with other fields. So if you look at kind of high energy physicists have always been kind of doing it their own way and doing it in their own sort of collective way and sharing preprints and those sorts of things. And then you have lots of journals where kind of people are resigning from their commercial publishers and then starting out on their own. There's nothing about that, that's a humanities and social science thing per se. So yeah, I think it's something which is different from the sciences because the advocacy within the sciences tends to be. We actually no longer like journals. The advocates of science based kind of publishing reform kind of want to get rid of journals. And so what they tend to do is experiment in things like, like preprinting preprint servers and sharing working papers and then things like, then you build kind of things on top of that, like reviewing on top of that and that sort of thing. So the idea is probably in the humanities and social sciences we are still more comfortable with the journal form. Us as kind of sort of advocates and people who are sort of forward looking even they are still happy with the journal form, whereas in the sciences they're a bit more like actually do we need these? But equally the same kind of things exist in the sense that it's communities getting together and just doing something for themselves differently. So yeah, it's really something which any academic of any discipline could get into.
- [46:46]
Steven Pinfield
Okay, so one of the interesting features of your argument is. Well, your argument first of all is a critique of the current global system of publishing. And what you're proposing is that it should be replaced by a scholar led community approach to publishing using the commons based approach. And the commons is based on community, necessarily local, it might be said. In fact, you say as much in your book. You say the commons is necessarily a local community centric activity. But doesn't this create a kind of tension in your argument? Because scholarly communication is a global phenomenon which has to address kind of global issues. How can these kind of local solutions address those problems? You talk about scaling small. What does that actually mean? Because the question is, does this small, this scale at a global level?
- [47:53]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, I mean, I think, and I've already said that I'm always really wary of proposing kind of global solutions. I think that the moment you do start to think that this could be the global solution to something, you're kind of entering into that sort of commercial logic a little bit, that it's something that can be kind of extrapolated upon and scaled and actually often just commercialized. Like commercial logic really is that sort of big maximalizing logic. But you're right that there is definitely a place for. I don't want these individual projects to just stay small and kind of on the margins completely. And so that's why I talk about this idea of scaling small. Now scaling small is something that I and my colleague Janneke Adamer came up with, which is a way of thinking. How can we think about these presses as something more than the sum of their parts? And so if you, you bring these presses together and these publishers together and you say to them, you're responsible for looking out for one another and you're responsible for doing that in a really meaningful way. And you can do that in various ways. It could be really informal networks of looking at, or it could be actually formalised forms of governance where you make agreements to say, I will share X number of resources with you or I'll do that sort of stuff. And so if you do that and you weave all of these presses together and you make them mutually reliant, like reliant on themselves and each other for their own sustainability, then you've created something much bigger at the same time as preserving that local context. Now I think that local context is really, really, really important. It's something which should never be kind of homogenized or smoothed over. Of course you have to make decisions about how much things can scale and how much you do smooth that sort of stuff over. But essentially, if you take the idea that we want to preserve smallness and diversity, or what we would call kind of biblio diversity, then the only way you can do that is to preserve it and then ask those to sort of support one another. So when I talk about the scholar led presses and then I talk about the library LED presses and the university presses and all these sort of ones that are doing non commercial publishing and they're doing it really well, what I want to see more of is kind of organizations that do exactly that, that allow them to scale, that allow them to kind of be resilient whilst maintaining that kind of locality. And you do that through different kind of member organizations, I suppose. So the radical open access collective is one. There's the coping Project in the UK as well. It's doing for Open Access books and there are plenty worldwide as well. It's all about how you rethink what forms of organization are needed beyond just we have one organization, we're on our own, and we kind of produce ourselves and we are commercial. That's kind of what I want to move away from and doing it, and that actually comes back to care, is that you cannot conceive of something ethically without considering the entanglement and the mutual reliance of everything with one another. And so it's all about how you actually recognize that sort of mutual reliance and you sort of elevate it or you kind of bring it to the fore as much as possible. So that really is quite theoretical, but at the same time it's really something which is happening is that you see, like the radical Open Access collective is an example of that. It's a group of people who come together and they literally do look out for one another. And what's come out of that is like other organizations have, have emerged from that. They're a lot more formal than ours. And so if one publisher kind of folds, then the other ones will sort of take on their materials and they'll preserve them in the long term. And so it's all these ways of thinking which actually this stuff relies on collaboration and no longer thinking of ourselves as competitors. And I think that's the way which you can kind of see having some kind of impact. And that means just thinking about, about the way that we produce publications differently.
- [51:55]
Steven Pinfield
Might this be seen as somehow chaotic or haphazard when there isn't an overall kind of vision and you're expecting things to develop, if you like, from the ground up? Isn't that in itself problematic when we have a literature to disseminate science and other forms of, of research which requires a certain stability, if you like. Isn't this a rather chaotic. Or couldn't it be seen as a rather chaotic response to the needs of the community?
- [52:35]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, I mean, you could look at that from two angles, I think. I mean, the current system we have is like horrendously chaotic in terms of like every week we see a new store story coming out about how the sheer number of publications that are being published that publishers can't keep track of are leading to just weird stuff getting published and AI generated nonsense and all this kind of stuff. And so the chaos there comes from the fact that they cannot cope with the amount of submissions that they are trying to themselves publish. I think smaller communities at Least kind of avoid that trapping because they're not completely, completely sort of motivated by the idea of publishing for money and so they can actually work on smaller projects. These kind of presses tend to publish less frequently. They do so in a much smaller way. But at the same time you're right that this doesn't have the smoothness of those sort of commercial networks. It doesn't have the sustainability in the same kind of way of thinking about it. My feeling is that kind of chaos is firstly necessary in the sense that we need to be thinking of new forms of getting together and organizing. I think that's the only way we're going to kind of get out of this mess is by experimentation rather than sort of thinking. We have a predefined understanding of what we want to do to begin with. I think. Yeah, it's kind of. Yeah, I think I'll end that question there.
- [54:09]
Steven Pinfield
So you mentioned one feature of this scholarly approach is that people aren't necessarily motivated by making money. But I'm interested as well in your book that you say this shouldn't necessarily be seen as a cost saving approach. Many open access advocates do talk about cost savings quite a lot in their. Their advocacy. So whether it's cost saving or not, somebody's got to pay ultimately, haven't they? This doesn't come free. So what's the model? I was going to say business model, but actually that may not be the right term. What's the sustainability model for this kind of approach?
- [54:54]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Yeah, I think that the sustainability model is in many ways a lot of the stuff is in kind of in kind labour provided by people who are working often in universities. And I don't want that labour to be exploited at all. I think it's kind of we need to pay people for their work. Publishing is a skill. The reason I'm calling it an act of care is because that care is a skilled activity. It's not something that can just be to be left to those kind of cookie cutters. So I'm very, very keen to sustain and to do that in a way that's ethical and the way to do it. I mean, we did a study of these kind of presses at Cambridge, sort of scholar led presses at Cambridge and one thing we found is that they actually don't have sustainability models. They have very little funding and they don't really. And they'd like to have some more but it's very difficult to acquire. But at the same time they don't actually need a huge amount of money. Now I don't think that we should in any way be motivated by cost efficiencies, because again, if you're motivated by that, you're motivated by the same things as the Elseviers and the Wileys of the world, who are amazing at cost saving. Their publishing processes are incredibly efficient because they kind of don't pay for the labor in the same way they should do. And they have all these sort of technological tricks to their game to make it as cheap as possible. So I don't think that we should be doing that at all. But at the same time, we don't need sort of really expensive publishing networks. We just need to figure out the ways to get these kind of small pots of money to small journals and then allow them to do that. And so there are lots of different ways of funding publishing in that way. So the Open Library of Humanities came up with what would be called a consortial method of funding, where libraries pay small amounts of money to a particular publisher and then they redistribute it out to the journals. And that's good because it means that libraries don't pay huge amount of money and you, you're just. But then everyone has open access and it's not really commercially motivated. At the end of the day, it's just done to sort of break even. And that speaks really to the sort of return to diamond open access that I mentioned earlier. So diamond open access really has found its kind of center stage in the policy landscape, particularly in Europe. Policymakers are really interested in doing that. And so you can imagine a situation where, where actually we start to fund publishing via state mechanisms. Again, like we used to, like when we had a rich tradition of kind of well funded higher education and all those sorts of things, we actually sustained publishing in that way. I mean, university presses in the 60s and 70s were not expected to make money. They were doing it in a subsidized way. And so they could publish what they want without kind of commercial logic getting in the way of them. And so I'd love to see a return to that somehow. Now there are massive dangers there though, because if you say to a policymaker, there's this kind of scholar led publishing here, it's really cool. Academics are doing it all. Should we support it? They might say, actually, yeah, go and support it, because then we don't have to pay publishers anymore. But we don't have to give these guys money anymore either, because they're doing it already. So I really want to move away from the idea that it could be about Austerity but by the same token, kind of publishing is already about austerity. And so the thing that we're doing is just a way of reimagining the economics of publishing, I think. And part of this comes back to the sort of, like I said, advocacy for the humanities and the social sciences, but also advocacy for the university. The marketized university has been completely transformed, at least in the UK by tuition fees and those sorts of things. And the state has, has gradually pulled away resources and now we're in the uk, we're at crisis moment where jobs are being cut left, right and centre, particularly in humanities and social science disciplines. And all of this is interrelated. It's like we need to be making those arguments for why these things are not best funded via market mechanisms, but instead via state mechanisms. So it's just about those arguments. Now I'm not in any way saying, saying that me saying that open access is a good thing that can be funded in this way is going to impact on those arguments necessarily, but you want to make kind of allies with the people who are also making those arguments and then something better might come out of that, I think. Yeah.
- [59:26]
Steven Pinfield
Okay, so that leads us on to my final question, which is around where do we go from here? You've provided a really robust critique of the existing interesting setup with regard to open access and pointed out some of its strong points, like examples of open access in the Global south, for example, as well as Global north scholar led initiatives. So you pointed out some of the strengths and weaknesses, but where do you expect things to go from here? You're proposing quite a radical solution. So bearing in mind the arguments of your book, what do you expect to happen over say the next five years, the next ten years and beyond?
- [60:14]
Dr. Samuel Moore
I mean, I think that one way of stimulating engagement in these kind of practices is to emphasize that it does require a sort of a change of practice and a change of mindset. So one of the main problems with the open access sort of movement is that it just assumes that, that we can allow people to publish in exactly the same way as they always have done and then just make that work. Open access at the end of the day, and that's obviously meant that lots of that's kind of led to the commercial outcomes that I've talked about. So a better way of doing it is engaging scholars in these practices and that could be via things like open research. So the broader open research movement, which has traditionally been kind of quite sort of about kind of data and sharing kind of peer review Comments and software and all these sorts of things. But what it is, if you point to people to that and say, actually you can change your practices with respect to openness, then it starts to look a bit kind of an interesting way of engaging people. The main thing we need to be doing is engaging academics and getting them to think about kind of why they're researching and publishing in the ways they are, are why is they are sort of, they're told they need to submit a book and the book looks like a book and it's 80,000 words and it's authored by a single author. Or why is it scientists are told they have to publish in Nature in this way on a really sexy topic, and they have to kind of massage the findings to make them look as impactful as possible. All these things. We need to be kind of offering alternatives. And you do that not by sort of saying you should do X, Y and Z, but more by saying, saying, let's experiment, let's do things differently. And that requires just sort of building capacity into alternative forms of things like research assessment and new approaches to actual kind of openness itself to how we can kind of research differently. So I'd really like us to have learned the lessons over the last 20 years of what happens when you sort of tell academics that they should be publishing open access and you give them some funding to do so and realize that that's not a good way of stimulating kind of these broader good behaviors. And in fact say, actually the way to do it is via experimentation. And it doesn't take lots and lots of big kind of money, grants or anything like that. It takes more just like local stimulation in different universities, saying, we will kind of value your approaches to sort of collective ways of working, or we'll value your ways of engaging new publics or all these sorts of things. And so, and that in itself is a kind of a form of openness that I think would actually then resonate really well with the open access movement. So it's about engaging academics who by and large have not been particularly well engaged in these things. Even at the same time as open access being as popular as it is, they by and large don't really care about it. We need to get them to care about the ways in which they're publishing, to reflect on that and to say, actually this is kind of not good and we need to do something different and better.
- [63:25]
Steven Pinfield
Better. Well, that's a very exciting, albeit challenging note on which to finish. Sam, it's been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for your time and for your very significant contribution to this whole debate. So, a reminder, Sam's book is entitled Publishing beyond the Open Access, Care and the Commons, published by University of Michigan Priority Press, and I'd recommend it strongly to you. Thanks very much, Sam. It's been a real pleasure talking to you today.
- [63:57]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Thank you very much. And, Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and. And save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [64:28]
Steven Pinfield
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [64:31]
Commercial Narrator
Cut the camera.
- [64:32]
Dr. Samuel Moore
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
- [64:35]
Steven Pinfield
Liberty.
- [64:36]
Dr. Samuel Moore
Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry, unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
- [64:40]
Steven Pinfield
Excludes Massachusetts.