Commoning the Humanities and Social Sciences at RESSH 24

Aislinn Shanahan Daly (Library Assistant, Marino Institute of Education)

The theme of the RESSH 2024 conference this year was Open Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Evaluation, Infrastructure and Practices. Many of the discussions had were relevant to the growing focus on open access (OA) and open research in libraries.

There were two case study sections at the conference specifically relating to OA. Scholars discussed ongoing projects at their institutions, such as Dounia Lakhzoum’s work with the NORF-TROPIC project into the training needs of academic staff in relation to open practices, and Michael Ochsner’s investigation into Open Science in Switzerland and how it is understood across disciplines. Philips Ayeni looked into the systemic and institutional barriers facing scholars who want to publish OA, noting that institutions need to create new evaluation systems that don’t prioritise prestigious pay-walled publications by default. Iva Melinščak Zlodi showed through examining the Croatian publishing landscape how OA practices can disrupt the hegemonic status of paywalled publishing.

The most provocative session at the conference was the keynote speech from Dr. Sam A Moore, the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Library, who also presented on the community-led publishing ecosystem at his institution. He is an organiser of the Radical Open Access Collective, which describes itself as “a heterogeneous community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other projects united by a commitment to diverse, non-competitive and experimental approaches to open access in the humanities and social sciences”.

Moore’s talk ‘Commoning’ the Humanities and the Social Sciences was primarily concerned with the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production in relation to OA and open publishing. He started out by describing the commons as a free public resource that is openly available and governed by the community. The key here is that the digital commons is a participatory system, and should be created and maintained by the collective - not by a small number of corporate academic publishers.

The popularity of OA is growing exponentially. 2020 was the first year in which more articles were published globally with some form of OA rather than through closed publishing. Despite this wide adoption of OA protocols, a lot of this activity is still heavily corporatised. Most large-scale publishers charge researchers with Article Processing Charges (APCs) for making their articles OA through the gold route. As well, publishers often retain gratuitous control over copyright even after publishing.

The quality of academic work is under great threat at the moment, with big publishers’ prioritisation of article volume. This has led to the phenomenon of the “AI paper mill”, in which forged scientific articles are published without adequate scrutiny from journal editors. This has even led to some disgraced journals shutting down completely. This year Wiley shut 19 of their journals down because of this blowup of fake science. This example shows how the domination of publishing by for-profit journals has caused serious damage to the legitimacy of academic research.

Another major issue for academic research is the reproducibility crisis, which has prompted a need for open science approaches that advocate for transparency and open practices at each stage of a research project. One of the problems that has led to this is publication biases that favour innovative results with statistical significance over negative findings and positive replications, alongside the massive financial pressure on researchers to publish.

The commons can be seen as a third way between the state and market - and reshaping academic publishing around the idea of the commons could truly address many of the issues caused by commercialisation. Publishing should be a community-centric activity that prioritises care and

cooperation throughout the entire process of publishing. Key to developing this community centric approach to publishing is scaling small.

Moore advocates for something called boundary-commoning, which involves different community-led commons initiatives working alongside one another to share practices and resources. Corporate publishers automate and defund the labour behind publishing, whereas community publishing and bringing publishing back in-house could allow small scale projects to share infrastructures and prioritise human connection and involvement. There have been recent developments with new university publishers that are governed by scholarly communities, such as the White Rose University Press. University College Cork’s Alphaville journal, which is a peer-reviewed online journal that operates under diamond OA principles, is a great example of in-house community driven OA publishing in Ireland.

The talk finished with Moore advocating for more journals to resign, become independent, and fully open. He also argued that OA work should be a recognised part of academic posts in which allocated time is given. In addition, to discuss this whole area without acknowledging the effect of severe cuts by governments and many university executives to the social sciences and humanities, which has left little space for funding OA work, would be naive.

The ideas of this talk were met with some criticism from the audience. A representative of the DIAMAS project rebutted accusations of them being “too centralised and standardising”. Another audience member critiqued the “arcadian” view of publishing that valorised the commons, arguing that large scale corporate publishing has allowed for expansive scholarly reach. How would small scale community oriented publishing create the same opportunities for academics to promote their research and make sure it is globally accessible? While the discussion at the end was left wanting in terms of answering these questions, Moore’s talk posited some thought-provoking and pragmatic proposals to the OA community.

It seems that OA in whatever form it takes will become the norm in academic publishing, whether people like it or not. The real question is, what kind of structure or framework do we as academics and librarians want to see surrounding OA? Often OA work can become an additional expectation of academic and library staff on top of their roles, without institutions actually putting in the resources to fund OA specific positions - where should the responsibility for this work lie? There is an argument to be had in some institutions to convince administrations of the need to provide resources to support this work. The other issue at hand is the predominance of APC driven, corporate approaches to OA publishing. It may seem idealistic, but to strive for something more ethics-driven and community-led could be important in this context. The field is to play for.

I want to thank the Irish Open Access Publishers for awarding me a partial bursary to attend this conference.