Competition and Cooperation (Open Humanities Press)

Introduction

Pamphlet

The “transfer of the responsibility of paying for publication to the individual author (or the author’s funding agency or institution)” that is brought about by gold author-pays open access is, as Gary Hall notes in Pirate Philosophy, a “typical neoliberal move.” By placing researchers in a position where they have to compete for the inevitably limited amounts of funding that are available to enable them to publish on an article- or book-processing-charge (APC/BPC) basis, gold author-pays open access serves as a means of introducing yet further competition into the public system of higher education. It also establishes a commercial market for A/BPCs, and with it another way of “inflicting debt” onto the university, to set alongside that achieved by the “imposition of a system of tuition fees in England” (Hall 2016: 193, n60).

It is not surprising then that calls are increasingly being made within the open access movement for non-profit presses, projects and institutions to cooperate horizontally in order to counter the hegemony of both free market economics and commercial publishing. When it comes to actually building non-profit alternatives, however, questions of funding soon come into play. A number of interesting innovations have emerged, not least in the form of library consortium subsidy models that redirect money otherwise used to purchase subscriptions to exorbitantly priced journals. Still, the long-term financial sustainability of numerous open access initiatives currently depends on already overstretched institutional budgets. As a result, even though many non-profit projects wish to work together cooperatively, they find themselves in a situation where they are forced to compete against one other (and against for-profits) for funding from libraries, foundations, research councils and other sources. Regardless of the fact they may consider themselves to have an alternative, even radical, mission, such non-profit publishing initiatives are still being organised according to the logic of the market and its principles of economic competition.

It is this logic that Competition and Cooperation seeks to interrogate by posing the following questions: is competition an inescapable fact of the scholarly publishing landscape given the underlying economics of our society? Or are there ways to negotiate the tension in the open access ecosystem between, on the one hand, the need to compete with others for scarce resources – especially money – and, on the other, the oft-expressed political preference for cooperation and collaboration? What is the potential of new forms of “open cooperativism” in which organisations commit themselves “structurally and legally to the production of common goods (the common good, the commons)” (Bauwens 2016)? The idea behind open cooperatives is to bring together the best practices of the coop movement, with those of the open source software communities, and ask their stakeholders to assist with funding, managing and organizing them (Davies-Coates 2017). Is it possible to follow such examples and devise a grammar or set of key concepts for competing open access projects that promote the ethics of care, collaboration and the building of the commons?

Open Humanities Press

References

Bauwens, Michel.  2016. Introduction to the republication of Benoît Borrits, “Cooperative And Common Ownership.” P2P Foundation, December 5. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/cooperative-and-common-ownership/2016/12/05.

Davies-Coates, Josef. (2017) “Open Cooperatives.” P2PF Wiki, March 2. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Cooperatives.

Hall, Gary. 2016. Pirate Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.