Open Humanities Press: Funding and Organisation

At OHP we are often asked about our funding model, how we are staffed, what organizational support we have, and the traditional publishing services we provide to book authors (such as copyediting, layout, indexing). What follows is a version of a reply to one such request for further information.

 Open Humanities Press (OHP) is an international, non-profit, open access (OA) publishing collective specializing in critical theory. It was established in 2006 by Gary Hall, Sigi Jöttkandt, and David Ottina, in collaboration with a wider network of scholars, librarians, technology specialists and publishers. 

Taking the academic ‘gift economy’ as its model, OHP experiments with different, more resilient (we prefer that term to sustainable) ways of working. Most of OHP’s funding comes indirectly: via publicly funded institutions paying our salaries as academics, librarians, technologists and so forth (although not everyone who is part of OHP works for a university – or even a publicly funded institution, for that matter). We are thus simply ‘gifting’ some of the time we are given to conduct research and provide academic services for the profession (peer-reviewing, journal editing etc.) to create open access publishing opportunities for others.  It is worth noting that, as Sigi Jöttkandt points out, ‘this largely volunteer effort is the norm rather than the exception’ when it comes to no-fee journal publishing in many humanities fields, ‘in both OA and non-OA sectors’. Some scholars may be fortunate enough to be offered reduced teaching or administrative loads by their institutions for establishing and running publishing projects such as this one. Others may have PhD students or graduate assistants they can ask to help with some of the work. Still others may even be given an assistant, funded by the academic institution, to help with the editorial labour. Another indirect source of funding occurs via institutions on occasion paying for the hosting of content. (Thanks are due to our OHP colleague Marta Brunner for this last point.)

 Operating on an ‘academic gift economy’ basis can actually be a significant source of strength to many independent humanities publishers. For one thing, it makes it easier to publish highly specialised, experimental, inter- or trans-disciplinary research. In other words, it supports research that, in challenging established disciplines, styles and frameworks, often falls between the different stools represented by the various academic departments, learned societies, scholarly associations, and research councils, and that does not always fit into the neat disciplinary categories and divisions with which traditional and for-profit publishers tend to order their lists – but which may nevertheless help to push a field in exciting new directions and generate important new areas of inquiry.

Yet we are aware the ‘gift economy’ can also be a potential source of weakness. It opens up many such initiatives to being positioned as functioning on an amateur, shoe-string basis.  Compared to a series or list produced by a large, for-profit, corporately owned legacy press, open access presses that use gift economy as their model are far more vulnerable to the accusation that they are unable to sustain high academic standards in terms of their production, editing, copy-editing, proofing and peer reviewing processes. They are also more vulnerable to the suspicion that they are incapable of maintaining consistently high academic standards in terms of the quality of their long term sustainability, the marketing and distribution services they can offer, their ability to be picked up by prestige-endowing indexes, and all the other add-on features a legacy press can often provide, such as journal archiving, contents alerts, discussion forums, etc. As Gary Hall observes, while this also applies to ‘independent’ print journals, it is especially the case with regard to online-only journals, the majority of which are ‘still considered too new and unfamiliar to have gained the level of institutional recognition required for them to be thought of as being "established" and "of known" quality’.

It is precisely this perception of open access in the humanities that OHP is endeavouring to counter by directly addressing these issues. Its explicit aim is to ensure open access publishing, in certain areas of the humanities at least, meets ‘the levels of professionalism our peers expect from publications they associate with academic "quality"'. 

With regard to the ‘traditional’ publishing services we offer to authors (such as copy-editing): in the ‘start-up’ period of the book publishing aspect of our project (which ran from 2009-2014), some of these services were provided by our then collaborator, University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office - which later became MPublishing, and is now known as Michigan Publishing. It is this partnership with MPublishing that, to a certain extent, has enabled OHP to publish open access books without ‘author-pays’ publishing fees or external funding, and to maintain high production standards and achieve a certain level of prestige of the kind one gets from being associated with a legacy print press in the process. We say ‘to a certain extent’, however, because OHP has never been totally reliant on Michigan for these services – and is thus still able to offer them to authors now that we have brought our partnership with MPublishing to a close by mutual agreement.

 Not relying on author- or funder-pays models of publishing is important to us. Indeed, we are keen to explore publishing models that do not risk disenfranchising independent scholars, those in less wealthy institutions, or those with alternative viewpoints which do not necessarily meet institutional approval, be it at funding agency, university vice-chancellor or provost, research head or author processing charge (APC) committee level.  For this reason, we do not normally speak in terms of a funding model for OHP per se. Eileen Joy, who runs an independent open access publisher called Punctum Books, captures the spirit of this approach in the following terms:

 

rather than building one particular type of digital platform and asking authors to shape their work within that platform – whatever it might be – [OHP, but she is also referring to Anvil Academic here] have taken the riskier move of offering infrastructure and other types of support services that would be uniquely designed to meet the desires and needs of whatever creative and complex types of born-digital scholarship might be conceptualized by individual scholars, and I consider that incredibly progressive and exciting. (Eileen Joy, 'A Time for Radical Hope: Freedom, Responsibility, Publishing, and Building New Publics’, In The Middle, November, 2013)

 In sum, we are not in search of a one-size-fits-all solution to open access. Rather, each project that is ‘part of OHP’ – be it a journal, a book series, a blog or one of our Labs projects – is unique, inventing its own singular way of responding to its community’s needs. 

Videos from Radical Methodologies for the Humanities: Third Disrupting the Humanities seminar

On March 9th, 2015, the Centre for Disruptive Media hosted the third and final seminar in the Disrupting the Humanities seminar series. This seminar was titled ‘Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities‘, and featured papers by Monika Bakke, Lesley Gourlay, Niamh Moore and Iris van der Tuin.

 The videos of the presentations and the discussions afterwards are now available. You can find them underneath or on the wiki here, as well as on a separate YouTube channel here. This isn’t a ‘normal’ edit, though: as with the videos of the first and second seminars in the series, we have tried to make the them more ‘interactive’ by annotating them in an extensive way: e.g. by adding references to some of the websites, projects, persons and concepts that were mentioned in the papers, as well as by directly inserting tweets from the seminar’s participants. You can find more information about this editing process here: http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/experiments-in-editing/

Most of the credit for this goes to our Media Production students at Coventry University, in particular Sharifah Mian, who has been heavily involved in conceptualising, planning, recording, and editing the videos. Some of the new elements we have introduced in the videos for the third seminar include working with transparent layers and in a sense ‘overlaying’ the presentations in an attempt to be less intrusive. We have also experimented with incorporating short videos of the annotations instead of screenshots. Although this may mean these inserts are harder to read in real time, the thinking behind this is that we are able to insert more material in a short-time span, where viewers/readers have the opportunity to pause the recording to read the additional material should they wish to do so.

Radical Open Access conference

Radical Open Access

15th - 16th of June 2015

Two days of critical discussion and debate in support of an ‘alternative’ vision for open access and scholarly communication. The aim of the conference is to explore some of the intellectually and politically exciting ways of understanding open access that are currently available internationally. A particular emphasis is placed on those that have emerged in recent years in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

This conference is organized by The Centre for Disruptive Media at The School of Art and Design at Coventry University. 

Attendance and participation is free of charge. 

Register and find out more at: http://radicalopenaccess.disruptivemedia.org.uk/

Confirmed Speakers: An Uncertain Commons, Janneke Adema, Dominique Babini, Armin Beverungen, Mercedes Bunz, Marcus Burkhardt, Joe Deville, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Christian Fuchs, Rupert Gatti, Gary Hall, David Harvie, John Holmwood, Sigi Jöttkandt, Eileen Joy, Chris Kelty, Sarah Kember, Andreas Kirchner, Christopher Land, Stuart Lawson, Tara McPherson, David Ottina, Nate Tkacz, Marisol Sandoval, Joanna Zylinska

Projects and Presses: Culture Machine, CLACSO, Discover Society, Ephemera, Goldsmiths Press, Journal of Peer Production, Journal of Radical Librarianship, Limn, Mattering Press, MayFly Books, MediaCommons Press, MLA Commons, Meson Press, Open Humanities Press, Photomediations Machine, Punctum Books, Scalar, Spheres, tripleC, Vectors

Concept

'There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.'    

                   (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

While open access has at long last entered the mainstream in the global West and North, it is a particular version of it that is being taken up so widely. Open access is currently being positioned and promoted by policy makers, funders and commercial publishers alike primarily as a means of serving the knowledge economy and helping to stimulate market competition. This version has become so dominant that even those on the left of the political spectrum who are critical of open access are presenting it in much the same terms: as merely assisting with the ongoing process of privatising knowledge, research and the university. 

Rather than ‘working with the grain’ of neoliberalism’s co-option of open access, the Radical Open Access conference will reclaim it by asking: what is the potential for supporting and taking further some of the different, more intellectually and politically exciting, ways of understanding open access that are currently available internationally? A particular emphasis will be placed on those that have emerged in recent years, in the arts, humanities and social sciences especially. Radical Open Access will thus provide the impetus for bringing together many of those currently involved in experimenting with ‘alternative’ forms of open access: both to discuss the long, multifaceted critical tradition of open access, its history and genealogies; and to examine a broad range of radical open access models. 

As part of its refusal to concede open access, the conference will endeavour to strengthen alliances between the open access movement and other struggles concerned with the right to access, copy, distribute, sell and (re)use artistic, literary, cultural and academic research works and other materials (FLOSS, p2p, internet piracy etc.); and to stimulate the creation of a network of publishers, theorists, scholars, librarians, technology specialists, activists and others, from different fields and backgrounds, both inside and outside of the university. In particular, the conference will explore a vision of open access that is characterised by a spirit of on-going creative experimentation, and a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly communication and publishing practices, together with the institutions that sustain them (the library, publishing house etc.), to rigorous critique. Included in the latter will be the asking of important questions about our notions of authorship, authority, originality, quality, credibility, sustainability, intellectual property, fixity and the book - questions that lie at the heart of what scholarship is and what the university can be in the 21st century. 

Photomediations: An Open Book

PHOTOMEDIATIONS: AN OPEN BOOK

http://photomediationsopenbook.net/

Photomediations: An Open Book from Photomediations Machine on Vimeo.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Photomediations: An Open Book. The project redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience to produce a creative resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. Photomediations: An Open Book uses open (libre) content, drawn from various online repositories (Europeana, Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons) and tagged with the CC-BY licence and other open licences. In this way, the book showcases the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources.

 

Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. The book’s four main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which will be populated with further content over the next 18 months. The three open chapters are made up of a social space, an online exhibition and an open reader. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on photomediations, will be published in a stand-alone book form later in 2015, in collaboration with Open Humanities Press.

Photomediations: An Open Book’s online form allows for easy sharing of its content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open access’, ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open education’, the project also explores a low-cost hybrid publishing model as an alternative to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.

Photomediations: An Open Book is a collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University. It is part of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037. It is also a sister project to the curated online site Photomediations Machine: http://photomediationsmachine.net

Project team: Professor Joanna Zylinska, Dr Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Dr Michael Wamposzyc.

Project advisor: Professor Gary Hall.

Visit Photomediations: An Open Book: http://photomediationsopenbook.net

Follow us on Twitter: @photomediations

For further enquiries please contact: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk 

Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University III: The Freelance Microentrepreneur To Come That I Am

(Post-Welfare Capitalism and the Uberfication of the University is a series of 3 posts. Together they constitute the draft of an essay, which is itself the first part of a larger project on capitalism and inhumanism)

All my previous post's concerns about the sharing economy are of course only too easy to push to the back of our minds when we’re trying to find an inexpensive place to stay for a weekend break, or booking a taxi to take us back home from a friend’s place late at night. Many women consider Uber to be safer than a minicab, with its unknown driver (although there have been complaints that Uber could do more to ensure the safety of female passengers), while having the additional advantages of costing less than a licensed black cab, and being easier and more convenient than both. With Uber you can track your vehicle as it approaches, for instance. Others appreciate the freedom from having to deal with cash that Uber’s frictionless digital payment system provides. In fact, it’s perhaps only when we begin to think about these information and data management intermediaries from the point of view of a worker rather than a user, and consider their potential to disrupt our own sphere of employment (whatever that may be), with the associated consequences for our job security, sick pay, retirement benefits and pensions, that the full implications of the shift to a post-welfare form of capitalism they are helping to enact are really brought home. I don’t want to get into the kind of hype cycle that is still being worked through around open education and MOOCs. But since many readers of this piece are likely to be academics, researchers and students (and if not, then to have been a university student at some point in the past) let’s take Higher Education as an example.

LinkedIn, the social networking platform for professionals, recently spent £1.5 billion purchasing Lynda.com, a supplier of online consumer-focused courses. Although it doesn't address the sharing economy specifically, a report of this acquisition by Goldie Blumenstyk published earlier this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education is very effective in drawing attention to some of the implications of this deal for Higher Education. Of course, with its University Pages and University Rankings Based on Career Outcomes, LinkedIn already has enough data to be able to provide the kind of detailed analysis of which institutions and courses are launching graduates into which jobs and long-term career trajectories that no traditional university can match. And that’s before its purchase of Lynda.com. But what Blumenstyk’s piece in The Chronicle makes clear is that, with its immanent transition into being both a social network and an actual provider of education, it doesn’t require a huge a stretch of the imagination to appreciate how such data could now be used to develop a very successful data and information intermediary business model for Higher Education - if not next year then certainly in the near future, and if not by LinkedIn then by some other platform capitalist company. Such a model would be based on providing ‘transparent’ information on a fine-grained basis to employers, students, funding agencies, governments and policy-makers. This information would indicate which of the courses, classes and possibly even teachers on any such educational ‘sharing economy’ platform are better at enabling students to obtain a particular academic degree classification or other educational credential or qualification, make the successful transition to a desirable job or career, reach the top of a given profession in a particular town, city or country, and so achieve a high level of job satisfaction, security, salary, income and earning capacity over a specific period or even a lifetime.

But it doesn’t end there. The Chronicle article also details how LinkedIn bought a company called Bright in 2014. Bright has developed algorithms enabling it to match posts with applicants according to their particular achievements, competencies and skill sets. And, of course, it would not be difficult for a for-profit business with the kind of data LinkedIn now has the potential to gather to do much the same for employers and students - right down to the level of their salary expectations, extracurricular activities, ‘likes’, or even their reputational standing and degree of trustworthiness. This business could charge a fee for doing so, just as many online dating agencies are able to make a profit from introducing people with compatible interests and personalities as deduced by algorithms. They could then charge a further fee for making this information and data available on a live basis in real time – something that would no doubt be highly desirable in today’s ‘flexible’ economy, where many employers want to be able to draw from a pool of part-time, hourly paid and zero hours workers who are available to them ‘on tap’, often at extremely short notice. Moreover, feeding all the data gathered back into the system would mean the courses, curricula and class content of any such educational data and information intermediary could be continually refined and so made highly responsive to student and employer needs at a local, national and international level.

More ominous still, given that it would be able to control the platform, software, data and the associated ecosystem, such a platform capitalist HE business would also have the power to decide who could be most easily seen and found in any such alternative market for education (much as Google’s does with its page ranking, the European commission having decided this month that Google actually has a case to answer regarding possible abuse of its dominance of search through ‘systematically’ awarding greater prominence to its own ads). Understandably, perhaps, following as it does on the heels of the 2012/2013 clamour about xMOOCs, Blumenstyk’s analysis of LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com shies away from arriving at any overly exaggerated or pessimistic conclusions as to what all this may mean for Higher Education and its system of certification and credentialing. Nevertheless, if a company like LinkedIn took the decision to provide this level of fine-grained data and information for its own unbundled, relatively inexpensive online courses, but not for those offered by its more expensive market competitors in the public sector, it would surely have the potential to be at least as disruptive as Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn and co. have proven to be to date, if not considerably more so. For the kind of information about degrees and student final destinations, as well as the ability to react to market changes, that any traditional university is capable of providing on its own would appear extremely limited, unsophisticated and slow to compile and deliver by comparison. And, lest the adoption by a for-profit sharing economy business of such a hostile and aggressive stance toward the public university seems unlikely, it’s worth remembering that Google maintains its dominance of search in much the same way. In the words of its chief research guru, Peter Norvig, the reason Google has a 90-95% share of the European market for search is not because it has better algorithms than Yahoo and Bing, ‘it just has more data’. Indeed, one of the great myths about neoliberalism is that it strives to create competition on an open market. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay-Pal and early Facebook investor, emphasizes in his book Zero to One, what neoliberal businesses actually want is to be a monopoly: to be so dominant in their area of operation that they in fact escape the competition and become a market of one.

Of course, as a consequence of neoliberalism’s programme of privatisation, deregulation, reduction to a minimum of the state and public sector, and insistence that the university operate increasingly like a business, many of those who work in HE already have fixed-term, part-time, hourly-paid, zero-hour, temporary and other forms of contingent positions. Yet if something along the lines of the above scenario does come to pass, it will surely have the effect of disrupting the public university by means of a profit-driven business operating according to a post-welfare state model, much as Airbnb is currently disrupting the state regulated hotel industry, and Uber state regulated taxi companies. Increasing numbers of university workers will thus find themselves in a situation not dissimilar to that facing many cab drivers today. Instead of operating in a sector regulated by the state, they will have little choice but to sell their cheap and easy-to-access courses to whoever is prepared to pay for them in the ‘alternative’ sharing economy education market created by platform capitalism. They too will become atomised, precarious, freelance microentrepreneurs. And as such, they will experience all the problems of deprofessionalisation, intensification, precarity and surveillance such a post-welfare capitalist economy brings.

(To be continued… and in a more optimistic vein. For the university is also one of the places where the neoliberal forces I have described above are being opposed. The university is where we can create new ideas. It is also where we can help to build a sense of solidarity and common struggle.)