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[IP-OA_Forum] Registration now open! Conference: Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism, 10 & 11 April 2025, in Cambridge (UK) and online.

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Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism


Date: 10 and 11 April 2025

Location: The Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library (UK), and online


The third instalment of the Radical Open Access Conference focuses on the relationship between openness and activism, exploring what is next for radical forms of OA by addressing questions around publishing and social justice that those connected to the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) have been putting forward for years.


Join us for two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse and equitable future for open access. 


More details and registration via: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/ 

Speakers: Élisabeth Arsenault, Sarah-Anne Arsenault, Lucy Barnes, Simon Batterbury, Marc Herbst, Rupert Gatti, Angela Okune, Charmaine Pereira, Jeff Pooley, Ela Przybyło, Magalí Rabasa, Ash Sharma, Stevphen Shukaitis, Lauren Smith, Alessandra Tosi, Vincent van Gerven Oei


Journals and Presses: darkmatter, ÉSBC, Feminist Africa, Feral Feminisms, Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Radical Librarianship, mediastudies.press, Minor Compositions, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest


Conference Concept


The first Radical Open Access Conference in 2015 started from the position of neoliberalism’s co-option of open access (OA) publishing as just another profitable business model and instead put forward a different radical and scholar-led vision for OA. This led to the formation of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals, and other OA projects with

‘a shared investment in taking back control over the means of knowledge production in order to rethink what publishing is and what it can be’

Although a focus on more resilient and ethical scholar-led forms of OA publishing remains crucial in the ROAC, ten years later many connected to the original ROAC community have moved beyond openness and towards other goals, especially now that OA publishing is increasingly becoming the standard. In this context, the question is less about openness as such and more about openness for whom and at what cost.


At the same time, radical OA projects and communities promoting alternative and experimental forms of publishing have converged with various digital activisms and social movements organising around intersectional feminist, post- hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. In these contexts, the social activities making up publishing have become a space for critical reflection on and intervention into persistent power asymmetries in academia and traditional divisions of labour in publishing. They also have been connected with broader concerns of ‘how to work and live together’ in a world marked by humanitarian and planetary emergencies (Kiesewetter, 2024).


With this third instalment of the Radical Open Access Conference, we seek to explore what is next for radical forms of OA and, once again, discuss questions around publishing and social justice that those connected to the ROAC have been putting forward for years, while reclaiming ownership over the means of knowledge production and working towards different activist goals.


As a mutually-supportive community that brings together and is made up of scholar-led, not for profit publishers, journals, and other OA projects, as well as theorists, scholars, librarians, technology specialists, activists and others, from different fields and backgrounds, both inside and outside of the university, the collective has always attempted to strengthen alliances between OA and related struggles – including those that are opening out from OA (Kember, 2014) and are exploring how academic writing and publishing can both contribute to and be itself a form of social justice activism.


Going back to what we have explored in previous conferences and extending from there: how have or can radical OA projects establish what Laclau and Mouffe called ‘chains of equivalence' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) with other movements and struggles for social justice through their publishing activities? And in what way can we establish these chains of equivalence, or how can we scale small (Adema and Moore, 2021), while at the same time retaining a plurality of open movements, theories, and philosophies, which may at times conflict and contradict one another, but which can nevertheless contribute to the construction of a common, oppositional horizon?


Against this background, Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism aims to showcase a variety of alternative ways of organising around scholarly publishing as they unfold through social activities such as writing, editing, translating, maintaining, and archiving across disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It includes contributions from the radical OA publishing community but also aims to reflect insights from adjacent fields and struggles, for example from experiments in arts and humanities scholarship, digital activism, and social movement organising.


As part of this conference, we seek to explore questions such as:


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Tobias Steiner, MA

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3158-3136
Web: https://flavoursofopen.science
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