The LSE Anthropology Department, in collaboration with the OA Journal Made in China is organising a one-day workshop on Open Access and Academic Freedom on the 9th of September 2019. There are a limited number of seats available to non-speaking attendees. Please do not hesitate to get in touch should you wish to attend or have any question on the workshop:
Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences
9, September 2019
London School of Economics and Political Science
Academic publishing has been transformed into a highly profitable business. In the past, scholarly journals were primarily published through professional associations or academic institutions; now many are operated by commercial publishers with large profit margins. Their profits are achieved through a system of academic exploitation – not only is the writing and peer-reviewing provided free to the publisher, but authors are now also regularly required to pay an open access fee to avoid their work being placed behind expensive paywalls. As publications in ‘high-ranking’ journals operated by commercial publishers are required for jobs, tenures, funding, and promotions, academics feel under increasing pressure to ‘play the game’. This has serious implications for early career or precarious academics.
Over the past year, a number of high-profile incidents have further exposed the corrosive influence of academic publishing, including the willingness to censor content in order to maintain access to profitable markets. In August 2017, it was revealed that Cambridge University Press (CUP) had complied with the demands of Chinese government censors to block access on its website in China to over three hundred ‘politically sensitive’ articles published in its prestigious China Quarterly journal. Within Anthropology, allegations of abuse, misconduct and exploitation at the formerly open-access journal HAU have cast a long shadow on the prospects of basing open-access initiatives on a better footing in the discipline. Therefore, the current academic publishing system presents serious threats to academic freedom through the spectre of censorship, and to academic integrity, by delimiting the types of publications that ‘count’ for research assessment exercises. By this double bind, the system also works to subvert the political and ethical principles of open access publishing, as it enforces a culture of secrecy, precarity and self-exploitation that could be held up against independent efforts of delinking corporate profit from the social life of scientific ideas.
This workshop brings together representatives from high-quality, non-profit, open access outlets publishing across the European social sciences, Academic Librarians and OA publishers to discuss the pros and cons of open access and to learn from each other’s editorial and funding practices. The workshop aims at laying the foundation for an extended network of open access practitioners and advocates in academia and beyond. It will produce an ‘open access’ manifesto to set out an alternative vision for academic publishing. Drawing on the concrete experience and available literature on the topic, the manifesto will propose a set of principles by which organizational solutions and technical infrastructures could be progressively implemented to sustain the research communities of open access and afford universal access to the intellectual product of their labour.
The workshop will take place on the 9th of September, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm at the LSE.
PhD Academy
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