Open Access

On Situatedness, Knowledges and Absences: A Response to the Symposium on Decolonising Intervention

/ Meera / 2 Comments

The final post in our symposium on Decolonising Intervention. A massive thanks to Lee for organising and editing; errors in this final part are mine.  If tweeting, please use #DecolonisingIntervention. The earlier posts can be seen here: my introduction, Marta’s response, Lee’s response, Amy’s response and Megan’s response. The whole book is available for free Open Access download here.

My sincere thanks to all the contributors to this symposium for reading the book and responding with such thoughtfulness, seriousness and robustness. I respect them all enormously as scholars and have learned a great deal from their own work – a learning process which continues through this symposium as well. Moreover, the space for deep reading, critical feedback, intellectual argument and reflection is something that the structures of the neoliberal academy increasingly accumulate against; my pleasure and gratitude is deepened by the knowledge that the contributors have all actively managed to hold the door open in spite of this.

My response to their contributions will principally focus on the questions they raise and points of contestation. However, I was happy to see that the basic argument and conclusion of the book – that intervention is intimately structured by relations of colonial difference – is one with which they appear to agree and find compelling as an explanation for the continuation of failure. A primary hope of mine in writing this up was that one could not read this book and look at intervention in post-conflict or ‘fragile’ states, and its various ‘implementation problems’, without this understanding in mind. Having done this work, I find it now very difficult to read assessments of post-conflict state-building or development practice that continue to reproduce various forms of technocratic fantasy about how exactly it is that institutions, polities and economies are ‘built’ or ‘improved’.

Screen Shot 2018-06-23 at 17.40.35.png

This conclusion and the analysis supporting it has been reached through an engagement with the experiences and perspectives of intervention’s targets in Mozambique. Thus, the book is also concerned with how we study what we study in the field of International Relations – specifically how we cultivate what Niang deftly describes as the ‘value of uncanonical insights of subjects whose absence would otherwise give an incomplete account of the game of intervention’. The contributors had different reactions to this proposition and the way it was taken forward in the book, which I will look at below. Notwithstanding the challenges and complexities of this, I feel that if we are to practice a scholarship which is both more ‘scientific’ and more democratic, this kind of epistemic and methodological re-positioning of scholars vis-à-vis structures of power is absolutely critical. Continue reading →

Twilight of the Journal Vampire Squid

/ Pablo K / Leave a comment
This was in someone's open access slide show someplace, but the name, and therefore the credit, escapes me.

This was in someone’s open access slide show someplace, but the name, and therefore the credit, escapes me.

I have a piece up at e-IR today returning to the question of open access. It is partly an introduction to the issues, partly a manifesto on why academics should take the digital commons more seriously. But it is mainly intended as a provocation for the discipline (proto-discipline, non-discipline, borg-discipline, what you will) of IR, and a challenge to the in my view excessive resistance to open access that characterises its upper echelons. To wit:

What is IR’s contribution to the open access movement? Almost nothing, arguable less than nothing. There is no IR equivalent of ArXiV  – the hugely successful online repository favoured by physicists and mathematicians. Nor of PLOS  – the gigantic open access mega-journal suite favoured by hard scientists, which sustains itself on low relative processing charges. Nor of Cultural Anthropology – a learned society journal gone fully open access. No experiment like the Open Library of the Humanities – a new platform-cum-mega-journal funded by a conglomerate of libraries. No appetite for something like Sociological Science – an open access journal with quick review times and low, means-tested article publishing costs. There are a handful of open access IR journals, like Ethics & Global Politics (not to be confused with Ethics & International Affairs), the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, and the Journal of Narrative Politics, run largely on goodwill, but they are sadly lacking a disciplinary presence. Publishing in them will not make a career, and is unlikely to impress hiring committees which have an eye to bankrupt measures of quality like the journal impact factor.

Worse still, the discipline of IR has missed opportunities to make itself more open and relevant, all the while fretting over its introversion and lack of relevance. Some of our responses to the open access movement have been sadly conservative and dismissive. New journals like the European Journal of International Security and the Journal of Global Security Studies are run on the standard closed model. Neither the leadership of the British International Studies Association nor the International Studies Association have followed the innovations carved out by colleagues in anthropology, sociology or STEM subjects. And young journals that position themselves as disrupting orthodoxy (such as Critical Studies on Security) have nevertheless emerged under the imprint of familiar publishing houses. While Editorial Boards in other disciplines are considering resignation and boycott to force change on the system, IR scholars are joining an ever-growing list of titles that promote business as usual. Closed journal publishing has become common sense: unquestioned despite its manifest failings.

Continue reading →

The Wages of Sin

/ Pablo K / 4 Comments

Scrooge McDuck

The Times Higher reports stockholder relief. The fears of investors in pre-eminent parasites Reed Elsevier – that profits would be undermined by the move to academic open access – have been dissipated. Normal business is more-or-less resumed, thanks to the rise of hybrid publication models in the UK. That is, the combination between pay-to-publish that makes journal articles immediately available to all on the one hand and repositories for drafts and embargoed versions which preserve library subscription income on the other. In 2011, says the report [1], it looked like the push for widespread and substantial open access (rather than the soft version we’ve ended up with) might undermine the kind of market dominance that produces operating profits of 32%. Indeed, they expected Elsevier’s profit margins to fall by over a fifth in the face of full open access. But by September this year share prices were outperforming expectations.

The analysts write revealingly about the threat: “political intervention both in Europe and the US would force a shift to full Open Access journals, with negative consequences on the economics of Elsevier”. Revealing, too, on the concessions made to corporate publishers and divergent national policies. Despite more than a decade of agitation, debate, and now government mandates, “the rise of Open Access appears to inflict little or no damage on leading subscription publishers” for reasons that are obvious enough, should we care to notice them. Embargo periods and other restrictions protect profits, and so subscription levels remain high. Moreover, this manifestation of openness “may in fact be adding to profits”, because double dipping people.

The new reality is that we have two mutually reinforcing business models. Publishers can now add those Article Processing Charges (APCs) – many of which will be funded by the public purse – to their already bountiful subscription income. Unsurprising, then, that the stock performance of Reed Elsevier and Wiley continues to a grow at a neat pace. The future risk – so far as there is one – comes not from a revolution in publishing, but from library funding shortfalls caused by potential trouble in the economy at large.

Elsevier Profits 2011-2014

Source: Berstein Research, ‘Reed Elsevier: Goodbye to Berlin’, 24 September 2014

So open access is growing “in theory” but not in substance, which is to say, not in a way that realigns academic publishing. Continue reading →

Open Access, Institutionalised?: Or, Another Reason Why International Relations Is Failing As An Intellectual Project

/ Pablo K / 7 Comments

Soc Sci Tweet

The American Sociological Association (ASA) has announced that it will launch an (as-yet unnamed) open access general sociology journal as soon as possible (this year, maybe next). Its proposed features are a mix of traditional and new: there will be start-up cash and a stipend for Editors, peer-review is to be on the standard, appropriately ‘prestigious’ model (but expedited and light on style corrections), a traditional publisher (SAGE) is involved, authors will retain copyright, there will be no hard copies and therefore no limit on how much can be published in any given time period, all articles (accepted or not) will be subject to a $25 processing fee, and a variable tariff of Article Processing Charges (APCs) will be implemented, from free for scholars from “non-competitive” countries to $100-150 for students and $700 for non-members (for the first 12 months, APCs can also be waived, no questions asked).

The editors at Sociological Science (one of whom we interviewed last month) have noticed that this borrows heavily from their own initiative. Sniping aside, this is surely all to the good. An indication that major academic institutions are, at last, taking open access seriously. Not quite overhauling their systems, but adopting publishing platforms considerably more reasonable than the $3,000 APCs and business-as-usual structure previously threatened. This is an important point, since it supports the claim of some OA advocates that APCs may be financially better for the academy than historical subscription rates (I leave exacting comparisons of costs and the burden of double-dipping during any transition to one side). The problem has always been that the prestige economy (and therefore the social reproduction of universities) is not venue-blind. Low cost APCs in marginal journals are therefore of little help for those still seeking the (shrinking) securities of a formal academic post. But when the reputational power of learned societies is applied, it becomes much easier to envision a world of reputable (and hopefully high quality) open access journals charging APCs at a lower net cost than we currently pay through library subscription models.

The ASA is a powerhouse in these terms, and enjoys more market influence than the International Studies Association (boasting 13,000 members to our 7,000). It is all but inevitable that the mainstreaming of open access in this way will put the squeeze on the smaller open access journals, very many of which are labours of love, and some of which seem to actively treasure their reputation as insurgents or irrelevancies. If we want more material (and particularly the kind of material that carries value in an academic market) to be open access, imitation is the right kind of problem to have. Cultural Anthropology is another example of that shift (we got the gossip from them too last year), funding an open access conversion through the largest section of the 12,000 member American Anthropological Association.

Journal Profits

Profitability data from Harvie et al., 2012.

And yet this scenario is once again an embarrassing one for International Relations, which otherwise likes to imagine itself the most engaged and relevant of disciplines (state power! trade rounds! war and peace!). Continue reading →

What Does It Mean To Start An Open Access Journal?

/ Pablo K / 3 Comments

Following earlier interviews with Editors at Ethics & Global Politics and the newly open Cultural Anthropology, we present yet another insight into how to do open access, this time with Professor Kim Weeden of Cornell, a Deputy Editor of the new open access journal Sociological Science, which launched earlier this year. As the name suggests, this is a sociology journal (and a ‘general interest’ one at that), indicating yet another field in which open access is being taken seriously whilst International Relations languishes (not withstanding para-IR examples like Ethics & Global Politics and our friends at the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies). So what can we learn from the Sociological Science model? As usual, I’ve stuck some thoughts on at the end.

Sociological Science

1. Who initiated Sociological Science, and why?

Dissatisfaction with the traditional publication process, and in particular the peer review system, has been festering in sociology for a while. Seems like everyone has a tale of a paper that sat for months before an initial decision, received multiple rounds of “revise and resubmits” that extended the review process to several years, or was rejected because it reported on a replication study, didn’t make enough of a “theoretical contribution” regardless of the quality of the empirical analysis, or espoused truly novel ideas that ruffled the feathers of a single anonymous reviewer. Even papers that experienced relatively smooth sailing in the traditional review process can be 1-2 years on the wrong side of fresh before they finally see the light of day.

A couple of colleagues, including our Editor-in-Chief Jesper Sørensen, got together and started brainstorming alternatives. They recruited a few other like-minded colleagues to the cause, and this founding group hammered out the details. The founding group morphed into the current 7-person editorial board, which includes sociologists on the faculty of Cornell, MIT, NYU, Stanford, and Yale. All of us have tenure, and are at a stage in our careers where we have the energy and social capital to devote to starting a journal.

2. How has the launch of Sociological Science been funded?

We’re a volunteer effort. The founding group and core editorial team did all the legwork to set up the journal: incorporating as a non-profit, devising the editorial model, setting a fee structure, advertising through social media, creating the web site, hiring copy editors, working with libraries so that the journal is indexed in abstract search databases, you name it.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business has generously funded a temporary, part-time managing editor to help with the launch. Our next task is to raise the funds to make the managing editor position permanent.

3. Sociological Science uses a system of Article Processing Charges (APCs), charged at different rates depending on author seniority. How did this decision come about?

We’re a non-profit entity, so our goal in setting fees is to cover the costs of publishing, no more and no less. We decided on APCs as the easiest and fairest way to cover these costs.

Continue reading →

What Does It Mean To Become An Open Access Journal?

/ Pablo K / 10 Comments

Following an earlier interview with Eva Erman on editing the open access journal Ethics & Global Politics, another set of enlightening responses on academic publishing. This time with Professor Brad Weiss of the College of William & Mary and President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, which publishes Cultural Anthropology, the premier journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). It is a major journal by other metrics too (take your pick of GoogleScholar or Impact Factor). All of which is as preamble to the point: Cultural Anthropology will be a fully open access journal from 2014. Not just that. It has a web presence and offers a set of connected resources that are without compare (at least in my experience). Brad was kind enough to offer his time to answer some questions on taking a learned society journal of prestige open access.

Cultural Anthropology Cover Trimmed

1. How did the decision to make Cultural Anthropology open access come about? Who initiated it, and why?

There is a longish story here. For several years prior to this action, many members of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) Board, and our Editorial Board had been interested in pursuing an open access option. That really wasn’t up to us, as we are only one section of the AAA that maintains a contract with Wiley-Blackwell to publish more than 20 of its sections’ journals. However, the director of publications with the AAA, Oona Schmid, proposed the possibility, last August (2012) to all of the publishing sections that one of them could be permitted to go open access for the duration of the Wiley-Blackwell contract (which expires in 2017) given certain provisions. Our Board formed a task force, including some real experts on publishing and open access in particular, and this group determined that it was a good idea to pursue this option. As it happened, we were the only AAA section to elect to do so, so were authorized to make the transition, which will begin in February 2014.

2. How was the move to open access funded?

Again, a little complicated. For one thing, the SCA is the biggest section of the AAA, and our membership dues are important sources of revenue; but in and of themselves, they don’t cover the costs of publishing, as well as all of the other activities (workshops, board meetings, special sessions at the AAA meetings, a biennial conference, etc.) that the SCA undertakes. We have been able to build our fund balances over the last several years, when the Wiley-Blackwell contract brought us significant royalties. Between these two sources of funding, we are confident that we can make open access work – for now. In the long term, we are looking to develop an open access model that will incorporate many more sections of the AAA, so that whatever happens next in publishing (post-Wiley contract) allows sections to share editorial and distribution costs, which will substantially reduce the costs of publications for everyone. Our hope is that the costs of open access become so reduced through cost sharing, that each sections’ member dues will provide sufficient revenue to fund, not only their publications, but all of their other activities. This will probably mean that open access won’t be profitable, but will at least not be prohibitively expensive – and, crucially, that the professionals we hire to edit, publish and design the journal will get paid for their work.

3. It seems that your open access model, as paid for through membership dues, could be characterised as Article Processing Charges by another name. How would you respond to the objection that this is another drain on academic funds? 

We are seeking a middle ground. We cannot sustain open access for long on just membership dues; and we already have a broad membership, so we’re not asking for more money from members, we’re just using these funds for this purpose.  Moreover, we added the membership requirement primarily to reduce the number of unwarranted submissions that take literally hundreds of hours to process.  We are trying not to charge our members extra, but hoping that the fund balances we already have will keep our enterprise going until the AAA can generate a new publication model, which we hope will at least make open access more widely available, if not the standard model.

Continue reading →

HEFCE, the REF, Open Access and Journals in Politics, IR and Political Theory

/ Lee Jones / 15 Comments

UPDATE (8 September 2014): Lee originally wrote this as a guest post – providing some much needed concrete detail on journal open access policies – but is now with us for good.

Following the launch of HEFCE’s consultation on Open Access for any post-2014 REF, and the generally positive reaction to it here, I examined the potential implications of HEFCE’s proposals for journal publishing in Politics, IR and Political Theory. I wanted to know whether the serious threat in HEFCE’s earlier proposals – notably the rush for ‘gold’ OA and associated Article Processing Charges (APCs) – had been eliminated by a downgrading of the proposals to permit ‘green’ OA, by depositing a ‘final accepted version’ (FAV, i.e. post-peer review, but pre-type setting) into an institutional repository. I also wanted to see what embargoes journals placed on FAVs (i.e. how long after the ‘Version of Record’ (VoR) is published in the journal the FAV can be made public); what re-use was permitted (what sort of licensing); and also to compare this route with the ‘gold’ access favoured by the Finch Report and the RCUK policy. I also wanted to gather information that could be used as part of a ‘soft boycott’ of OA-resistant outlets.

To do this I selected 57 journals that broadly represent the ‘top’ journals in the three subfields. I used composite rankings from Google Scholar, the ISI Citations Index, and surveys of scholars where available, and got feedback on an initial draft. The list isn’t intended to be definitive, just to give us a better sense of where the ‘big journals’ in which many scholars aspire to publish actually stand on OA.

It is not easy to get this information. Policies can vary by journal, not merely by publisher, and their websites are often opaque on the issue of self-archiving, particularly in terms of licensing. This may change if, as seems likely, HEFCE forges ahead on OA; but publishers also need to be pushed to display clearer information. The exaggerated nature of the Finch Report’s estimate of UK HE’s market power to change publishing models is underscored by the fact that US journals tend not to provide the information I was looking for (my thanks to Sarah Molloy for help with this).

The results are presented below for Politics, IR and Political Theory (click to enlarge each image). There are a lot of complexities with various journals which are shown in the full spreadsheet of results which you can see here; the spreadsheet also lets you reorder the information by different criteria.

OA - IR

Journal Open Access Policies for International Relations.

Journal Open Access Policies for Politics.

Journal Open Access Policies for Politics.

Journal Open Access Policies for Political Theory.

Journal Open Access Policies for Political Theory.

Several conclusions can be drawn.

(1) Most importantly, Pablo and Meera were basically right: the threat of HEFCE rushing to a ‘pay to say’ approach with hugely detrimental financial consequences for universities and the potential for internal rationing of APCs, has been defeated, for now (although RCUK’s policies remain intact). Some journals, particularly in the US, don’t seem to support green FAV self-archiving, or have gold APC routes – this is a problem because they would be non-compliant with HEFCE’s proposals; so we will need to push for exemptions on this score. However, by and large, where they allow FAV self-archiving, none of the journals appear to charge a fee; HEFCE’s current proposals now intend to compel more researchers to do what they are already entitled to do. So long as this does not change, HEFCE’s proposals should not involve ruinous costs or lead to APC rationing.

Continue reading →

What Does It Mean To Edit An Open Access Journal?

/ Pablo K / 20 Comments

Yet another post on open access, but this time featuring a non-Disorder voice. I recently exchanged emails with Dr Eva Erman of Uppsala University on the possibilities and constraints of open access publishing. Eva is the Chief Editor of Ethics & Global Politics, a fully open journal that not only attracts authors of note in normative international political theory (Zygmunt Bauman, Saskia Sassen, Bruno Latour, John Agnew, R.B.J. Walker, Heikki Patomäki, Lea Ypi, Catherine Lu, and our own Rahul Rao!), but has also achieved an Impact Factor above that of many well-known and ‘closed’ journals (0.808, putting it 20th in Ethics and 53rd in Political Science).[1] As we have already discussed, fully open journals of this kind (what might be termed ‘No APC Gold’ journals) can face serious resource constraints, so it is worth understanding what might be possible. My exchange with Eva is book-ended with some thoughts on what it all means.

Ethics and Global Politics

1. Who began the journal, and why?

I got the opportunity to start the journal in 2007. A woman from a newly established publishing company, Anne Bindslev who runs Co-Action Publishing, who knew about my work, asked if I thought there was a subfield/niche within political science that was lacking among prominent journals. And I thought that back then, journals in ethics were not very good at publishing articles in political philosophy and, more specifically, on international political theory and global politics; and journals in international affairs, such as Ethics & International Affairs, were not very theoretically impressive. So, this is why I said yes to launch Ethics & Global Politics. Another reason was that I became interested in open access (OA) as a publishing model, and also for normative reasons thought that a journal that publishes in global ethics, global justice and so on, should do so open access to all people.

2. How is the journal funded? Are Editors or their assistants paid? 

Together with Co-Action publishing (who now run more than 25 OA journals in natural and social sciences), I have managed to get funding for OA publication from two different Swedish funders, the Swedish Research Council and FAS. The last year, FAS has been replaced by funding from Uppsala university, where the journal is editorially based. Of course, this is an insecure situation, economically, since I have to apply for renewed funding every year, which is always a bit uncertain.

The exact budget for 2013 consists of 165,000 Swedish crona (from the Swedish Research Council) and 70,000 Swedish crona from Uppsala university. This is in total an annual cost of around £23,500 or $36,000.

Pretty much everything goes to Co-Action Publishing, who are responsible for production management, webpage, copyediting and type-setting, as well as getting everything out on professional proof reading. Co-Action Publishing do not make any profit from running OA journals. Of course, the voluntary or almost voluntary work on the editorial side, by me mostly, is more difficult to measure.

3. How do you organise, and pay for, your online presence?

Continue reading →

Seven Propositions on Open Access

/ Pablo K / 1 Comment

Also Tumblr’d.

Library of Dream Lucien and Books

1. The embargo distinction between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social Science) is arbitrary and unjustifiable: if there must be embargoes, let them be 6 months for all;

2. Set learned societies free! They can choose not to be open access if it would drain too much from their coffers. Their prestige (and the prestige of publishing with them even if that means not being returnable to research assessment exercises) should sustain them;

3. Moreover, learned societies are not an unqualified good. Some of them may need to, might even usefully, disappear;

4. Open access is a public good, but it doesn’t require that justification. The inequalities of the global academy, and the division of access to knowledge within it, are plentiful reason enough;

5. Any arbitrary barrier to access, however small, should be resisted. Having to sign up to a repository to access research, or click a special request button, or navigate a series of log-in pages, disrupts access. Articles must be as easy to reach as commentariat opinion pieces. Otherwise you get closed access by nudge theory;

6. Access is a big battle, but not the whole battle. The form of research, the mode of its dissemination, the barriers of disciplinarity, and the legitimacy of ‘academics’ and ‘intellectuals’ in public debate are all also crucial, and currently under-interrogated;

7. ‘Knowledge’, likewise, is up for contestation. Who produces it, what gets excluded by the fetishisation of peer review, what the conditions of academic labour are today (and will become in the next decade), how academics represent the authority or sanctity of their work to civilians: all that needs to remain present as the horizon of possibility.

Getting Somewhere: HEFCE Proposals on Open Access for a Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework

/ Meera / 15 Comments

zimbabwe-press

This week, the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) published their formal proposals for including an open access requirement in any post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Responses to this will be accepted until 30th October 2013. These proposals follow a pre-consultation letter and set of responses which were submitted earlier in the year (link to University of Cambridge response).

Following up our concerns about the policy raised over the last few months (here and here, further posts here) the present iteration represents a decent outcome on some of the details, not least because it defers quite a few of them. That these issues have been deferred does not mean that they do not matter; rather it means that the battles on them will be fought elsewhere – with universities, with journal boards, with learned societies, with publishers and their lawyers and so on. Moreover, there is no cause for complacency around the broader political economy of scholarly publishing, which remains wasteful, restrictive and inequitable on many fronts. And of course, the pernicious REF exercise itself, which this government signalled it would review, must be itself vigorously contested (more on this to come).

The Requirements

The proposals are to require that any REF-submitted journal article or conference proceeding published after 2016 must be made available in the final post-peer reviewed version from an institutional repository at the point of acceptance (or publication). This in line with the previous agenda of RCUK and others, and maintains journal exclusivity by accepting substantial embargo times on truly open (read: public) viewing of these deposited versions. So a paper “immediately” placed in an institutional repository may still not be viewable for up to 24 months in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (recall that this length of permissible embargo was extended in the face of publisher lobbying), although it may be possible to request papers directly from the author on an individual basis. This version of mandated open access is applicable only if the address line of the author is a UK HEI at the time of publication, and cases for exceptions can be made. HEFCE’s assessment that this should be broadly achievable under current provisions is reasonable, and represents a good path for opening up access to research under present conditions. From the perspective of maximising green OA, Stevan Harnad’s response is as ever highly incisive. Below are some reflections on the present state of play.

What Has Been Won and Deferred

First, the old green/gold battle is now (nearly) over, and with it the concerns that academics would routinely pay exorbitant author fees to have their research published. Continue reading →