 Yeah, it's my absolute delight and pleasure to welcome both Yannicka Ademé and Joe Deville to OER20. I'm going to just say a few things before I hand over to them. And first of all, really a huge big thank you to Joe, as I think he's really gone that extra mile trying to both keep into the spirit of what we were trying to do with this particular session. And I think he decided to self teach himself video editing. So I think yeah, both Yannicka and Joe, thank you so much for continuing in that spirit of trying to build this base as a conversation and to sort of really help us sort of shape some of the ideas. So for me, this is a great opportunity to sort of try and pull the multiple aspects of my world and working together. So I just wanted to introduce two key publications. So rather than, in a sense, introduce Joe and Yannicka through their biographies, which are astounding. We have that information online. I think it was it was two key moments that I think really drew us to sort of inviting them to join us today. One being the opportunity to work quite closely with Yannicka on a special edition of the Journal of Media Practice, which was explicitly convened and conceptualized and edited and performed as a collective endeavor between two units. One being the disruptive media learning lab and the other being the center for disruptive media at Controversy University. And I think it's important when we hear those terms and we hear them time and time again over the past five, six years or so, that for us that disruption was something that is very much an affirmative practice in the sense that it enables and allows us to experiment with new forms of critique, to rethink and performatively disrupt some, in this case, academic publishing's core final concepts and practices and to challenge that sense of the single author. And again, I think with Salva's keynote presentation, that sense of collective endeavor in order to produce these films is very much at that heart. So moving beyond the single author and that sense of a linear argument and a linear way of reading from that fixed and finalized sort of text object. To dip into this, it was also a challenge as to how do you make that something which is driven through curated conversations, working with people such as Remy, embedding hypothesis as a key processual way of exploring the production of the articles. We ran a series of meta projects through their open peer review, as well as really thinking of the versioning of what a publication should be today. And I think that was something that we thought really resonated with this sense of direction and different ways of exploring the challenges that we have within education today. So that's that's my way of introducing kind of the hugely talented Yannicka. And I think again, the relationship and connection to Joe came through in the formation of the radical open access collective, which was formed immediately after the 2015 conference, which was really looking at horizon alliance between like minded groups that were dedicated to sharing of skills, tools and expertise. So again, rather than championing this this one, this one approach, the sense of collective endeavor. And since that community has now grown to over 40 scholar led, not not for profit presses, journals and other projects. And the slide deck here shows the pamphlet from the commons and care, and in which Joe produced the article kind of the essay open access publishing and the future of the university, which again, although not timed in the way, I think we can now also sort of explore that in multiple ways. And his question and challenge and pose at the beginning of that in his in the contribution was might now be the moment to more carefully reconsider the relationships for the university and academic publishing and academic book publishing, in particular, as one of the editors of the scholar led access publisher mattering press, this question is something that I've been thinking about for some time. And hopefully, our conversation I shall hand over to Joe and Yanaka. Perhaps everybody could use the the wonderful clap emerges in the chat and welcome Joe and Yanaka to the stage. I think you might say something briefly and then take us through into into the video conversation. Yeah, I just want to thank everybody and thanks for tuning in this morning. I think we just have a video so I think we can just start and play that. Hi, my name is Janneke Adema and I'm an assistant professor at the Center for Postage of Cultures at Country University. So I'm a researcher or explores the future of the book, but I also support a variety of scholar led not for profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, Scholar led and Post Office Press. And I'm also the co PI on coping the community led open publication infrastructures for monographs projects. Hi, my name is Joe Deville. I'm a lecturer at Lancaster University and also one of the co founders of the Open Access Book Publisher Mattering Press. In this video, we're going to attempt a digitally mediated conversation on the relationalities of care in open access publishing. Our conversation will be structured around four questions. First, why care in open access publishing? Second, where is care in open access publishing? Third, how to do care in open access publishing? And finally, what are the limits of care in open access publishing? After that, we'd very much welcome your questions and comments. Okay, so on to our first question. In many ways, publishing itself can be seen as a form of care. It is about communicating and sharing our research with our wider community, with the wider public, to further build and expand this public. This is especially the case with open access publishing, which makes the argument that there shouldn't be any pay or reuse barriers for others to access our research. However, a lot of care labor is involved in enabling us to share this research. This care labor extends to our means of creating publishing and communicating research. So the platforms and infrastructures that we use to our working conditions as scholars. So the institutions of which we are a part. And to our relations with others. And these others include our publishing objects, our books and publications. What is important to highlight is that for many of the publishing projects and practices which both I and Joe will present here today, such as Metering Press, the Radical Open Access Collective, Scholar Let, Pirate Care and Copim, caring for these means, these conditions and these relations of publishing involves an active intervention in and transformation of the systems and infrastructures which we use to conduct and publish our research. Especially since scholarly polishing has historically an open access more recently, especially in the global north, been rendered further complicit with neoliberalism's audit culture of evaluation, measurement, impact and accountability. So in this context, care involves moving away from the market-driven incentives frequently used to justify open access, such as that open access will deliver better value for taxpayers' money or will grow the knowledge economy. To focus instead on the values that underpin experiments in open publishing and scholarly communication, such as diversity and equity and indeed care. So the projects that Joe and I will discuss today show how an ethics of care can help to counter the calculative logic that otherwise permeates academic publishing. Here, rather than concentrating on scholarly products, objects and outputs, these initiatives want to instead draw attention to the relationalities of publishing. For them, a commitment to an ethics of care entails understanding publishing as a complex, multi-agential and relational practice, recognizing that we have a responsibility to all those involved in the publishing process. Caring for the relationships involved in this process is crucial, from rewarding or otherwise acknowledging people fairly for their labor wherever possible, to redirecting our volunteer efforts away from commercial profit-driven entities and to instead support more progressive, not-for-profit forms of publishing. But it also includes taking care of the non-human, not just the published object itself, but all those animals, plants and minerals that help to make up the scholarly communication ecosystem. Such an ethics of care presents a potential alternative to the hegemony of specific forms of relationality in contemporary publishing, once in which the logic of the commodity tends to be imposed on all social relations. Care has the potential to help officers engage with the calculative logic and metric-based regimes that permeate academic publishing infrastructures and increasingly determine how we relate to one another. What is important here is that a lot of historical care work within scholarly publishing falls outside of what is valued within this calculative logic. So practices such as reviewing, editing, editorship, mentoring, building networks, building relationships with and intervening in the outside world, and with that I mean beyond rigid definition of what within academia is valued with impact narratives. With the rise of these kinds of calculative logics, care practices start to fall by the wayside and care is increasingly directed towards our own individual practices, outputs and metrics, not towards building up solidarity with the various collectivities in which we function, which is what caring should be all about. As Samuel Moore states, In highlighting the relational nature of publishing practices, the employment of care as a guiding principle represents a move towards considerations of the community over the individual. This is a key facet of care which represents a critique of liberal individualism by emphasising relationality and interdependence over rational individualism and calculation. What I guess I'd like to add to this conversation is the suggestion that an ethic of care might supplement an ethic of openness in scholarly publishing. As Janke mentioned, care there might help us challenge calculative logics and the logics of the commodity that continue to dominate scholarly publishing practices. However, we can also observe that these logics are by no means incompatible with an ethic of openness. Commercial closed access publishers are increasingly using openness not only rhetorically but also practically in their activities. It may not always be something that sits comfortably with their more established ways of operating, but these publishers have shown themselves to be highly resourceful when it comes to adapting their ways of working in the face of openness, the challenge of openness, notably by generating new revenue streams via the charging of APCs and BPCs, article and book processing charges. The challenge of openness then has not fundamentally changed the underlying logics of profit seeking that characterize commercial publishing. It's instead merely led to a shifting of the sites where profit seeking activities occur. As I'm certainly not the first to point out, you cannot therefore rely simply on opposing closure with openness to solve the problems of publishing. As Nate Katz has observed, the quote seeds of closure are already always present within the open. And we can see all kinds of ways in which the thoughtless openness has the potential to create a whole host of new problems. There are many reasons why publishers might want to work very hard to keep closed off some of the conversations it has with authors, early drafts of work, uncaring reviews by way of just some examples. Within the work done by Mattering Press, therefore, we quickly realized and did so fairly instinctively, I guess, that an ideal of openness is capable of doing only some of the practical, intellectual and ethical work that we're hoping to achieve. An ethic of care emerged for us as a helpful interlocutor with an ethic of openness. We initially drew our interest from the field of science and technology studies, which is more or less where we locate ourselves as a press, notably from the work of Anne Marie Moll, who counterposes a logic of care to a logic of choice. Although it should be said, we also draw influences from a range of other places, notably the extensive feminist work on an ethics of care, thinking of the likes of Nell Moddings and Virginia Held, for example. As Yannick had mentioned, a logic of care is interested in relational connectivity. This, as a publisher, means being attentive to the specific and situated challenges posed by engagements with others, whether those be humans or non-humans, and I'll talk more about this shortly in relation to infrastructures of publishing. A logic of choice, by contrast, is the logic that characterizes market relations and which is being implied in an increasing variety of contexts. In this logic, there is a presumption that the best outcome in a particular situation comes from individuals deciding, perhaps self-interestedly, between alternatives. In a scholarly context, this leads to the transformation of scholarly publishers into monopolizing profit centres, of students into consumers and of universities into commercial institutions in competition with one another, subject to all the troubling vagaries of ranking systems and all kinds of other internal and external assessments of quality. It is our contention as a publisher, and also the contention of many of those with whom I work on a range of other projects, that an ethic of our openness does not on its own have the moral and practical force to challenge logic of choice. This is why we contend we also need a logic of care. Okay, so when it comes to the wear of care in open access publishing, as I've already begun to suggest, I think it's really helpful to move our attention beyond a focus just on the human relations that sustain publishing practices to also include the non-human. And I guess what I want to suggest here is that in doing this, it's really helpful to think a little bit more deeply about the infrastructures of open access publishing. And this is obviously a topic that's been addressed, I guess, consistently by various people in their attempts to understand, I guess, the promise of open access publishing. Very famously, Jeffrey Builder, Jennifer Lynn and Cameron Nailand in their Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures suggested that quote, Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. Now I very much agree with them. The wear of care in open access publishing is not just in the relations between us, between publishers and readers and authors and reviewers, for example, but also in the relations that we variously have to some of those non-human entities that sustain open access publishing. However much I agree with Builder and colleagues in many respects, I do want to draw attention to the very specific dictionary definition of infrastructure that they work with. So infrastructure as quote, The basic physical and organisational structures and facilities, for example, buildings, roads and power supplies needed for the operation of a society or an enterprise. And I guess what I want to suggest is that when it comes to thinking about where care is in open access publishing, we may want to expand this definition of infrastructure. So compare it to example to this definition provided by Sandra Calkins and Richard Rottenberg. They're both social scientists working broadly in the field of science and technology studies, which is where I more or less locate my own work. So they define infrastructures as quote, Experimental material semiotic practices into weaving social, economic, political and legal orderings with moral, moral reasonings and technical networks that inevitably produce new and unpredictable assemblages that reconfigure the world. So this definition also addresses basic physical and organisational structures, but at the same time it addresses how these intersect with human relations. These are the meanings that we collectively assign to in this case infrastructure, so the semiotics of infrastructures. It also includes political orderings, moral reasonings. Infrastructures in other words are not neutral but rather have the potential to either support or challenge dominant understandings of how things ought to be done. From definitions like this, and I guess the broader work on infrastructure in the field of science and technology studies and beyond, I think we can put out three ways in which or three, I guess three areas where we might want to start to identify where care can do some important work in open access publishing. And first, this means I guess thinking about the fact that a care for infrastructures might require a shift from a focus on infrastructures alone to broader processes of infrastructuring. So this means attending not just to what is being built, which is of course very important, but what relations are exactly being put into play, what relations between organisations, individuals, materialities, data and society more broadly. And second, and following from this, that infrastructures are always situated, situated in particular contexts, and I guess when thinking about the where of care we need to attend to this situatedness, so situated in particular communities in relation to particularly historically specific moral, political and economic logics. And third, I guess in relation to all this, that infrastructuring is always provisional. So despite the tendency for infrastructures to come to be seen as unchanging and unchangeable, they are of course being constantly remade by the various individuals and organisations involved in constituting them and of course the various other relations that are being put into play. So what this means is that the building, the reinforcing and in some cases the challenging of infrastructures is an ongoing process. Indeed of course in the world of scholarly communications it is this very hope that infrastructures are provisional that continues to animate the open access movement and animate I'm sure many of the presentations in this conference. At the same time of course we continue to confront the continued resilience of infrastructures, particularly those that are I guess undergirded by commercial logics. So I guess the task for us is to think more broadly about where infrastructures are and that will I think help us identify some of the places in which we can intervene and intervene more productively in the constitution of an open network of scholarly communications. So where does care lie? I would like to follow up from what Joe mentioned with respect to the non-human relations of care established through publishing. Where Joe focused on infrastructuring as one of the processes that sustain scholarly communication I would like to focus on how care is established around the objects through which our research is published, namely our publications. How do we care for our books and journals? How does care extend to the published object itself and how our relationships and communities establish around and through this? As scholars we obviously care for our publications and want to ensure they are well and clearly written or performed and that they reflect our arguments, our research subjects and objects and case studies in the best way possible. But many other relationships of care are established around publications beyond that between authors and their books. In this respect Tahani Nadim, an editor at Mediterranean Press sees books as affiliative objects as objects within the publishing process that mediate and modulate relationships. Mercedes Boons, one of the editors of Maison Press a cooperative press focusing on media theory and digital culture argues that a sociology of the invisible would have to incorporate infrastructure work, which means that care for the published objects needs to include the work of acknowledging, accounting for and crediting everyone who is involved in producing a book or a journal. As she explains a book isn't just a product that starts a dialogue between author and reader it is accompanied by lots of other academic conversations peer review, co-authors, copy editors and these conversations deserve to be taken more serious as such the book can be seen as a form of interaction between different agents and consistencies. Although it is often seen as the end point it can also be seen as a nodal point around which these relationships of care between authors and readers, publishers, editors and reviewers circulate. When we understand publishing as a complex, multi-agent, relational practice then focus starts to be on how to better foreground these various agencies involved in knowledge production but this also includes an acknowledgement of the role played by non-human agencies in the production of books from paper to screens, ink, printers, trees and Amazon warehouses and by the book itself as a specific material form be it printed or digital in the relations it interweaves as part of its processional becoming materially, geopolitically, environmentally or as Gary Hall states all those distributed heterogeneous, humans, non-humans, objects, non-objects and non-entropomorphic elements that collectively contribute to the emergence and history of an ink on paper and card book following some more, care is in this sense relational rather than end directed it is a situated practice and for many of us these care practices are situated around the publications we collectively produce which as every evolving nodes in this network of relations at the same time again shape us as scholars and shape the specific relations of care that are fostered around them so some of the projects I have been involved in focus in specific on the question of care and care practices so one of these is the Radical Open Access Collective set up in 2015 this is a community of mainly scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects so the collective promotes a progressive vision for open access based on mutual alliances between the 60 plus members and seeks to offer an alternative to legacy models of publishing so based on the contingent and diverse philosophy of Radical Open Access the collective mainly means to work towards a framework of resilience of strength in diversity and in numbers as a philosophy Radical Open Access does not stand in opposition to open access or even to more neoliberal forms of open access it is more a repositioning of open access bringing it in line with again with its roots with how it is initially conceived by academics and librarians so Radical Open Access has always also been about rethinking scholarly communication and critiquing the hegemonic role and exorbitant profits of commercial presses so Radical Open Access seeks to push back against the dominance of these market-driven versions in order to promote non-commercial and not-for-profit scholar-led approaches to publishing as such Radical Open Access positions open access as an affirmative and ongoing critical project meaning that it's not one thing, model or overarching project a specific philosophy or a set of principles it consists of various groups, peoples, institutions and projects with their own affordances it embraces experimentation with academic polishing and writing with the form, content and process of academic knowledge production it involves a recognition and nurturing of underrepresented cultures of knowledge from para-academics to precarious scholars and academics from the global south so the projects experimenting with these more radical forms of open access tend to envision their publishing outlook within and as part of a relational ethics of care this involves highlighting the importance of making publishing more diverse and equitable so geographically but also with respect to issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality it involves nurturing new and historically underrepresented cultures of knowledge so those associated with early career, precariously employed and para-academics or located outside the global north of west and it involves ensuring everyone is able to have a voice not least those writing on niche or avant-garde topics who are conducting hybrid, multimodal, experimental forms of research and who are currently underserved by a profit-focused commercial publishing system but it also involves the sharing of resources of information, skills and time building up the collaborative communal knowledge already available within the different publishing projects and gifting this to the community so the website and information platform set up by the collective provide information for those interested in starting their own open access project it lists resources about the collective, resources related to school-led publishing and a directory of school-led presses so this effort towards resource and skills sharing characterizes the largest school-led publishing community as a whole but there is a focus on knowledge sharing overall and on mentoring of smaller or newer initiatives of co-publishing and community and consortium forming on various levels in this respect, the radical open access collective embodies what Samuel Moore and I have characterized as horizontal forms of collaboration forging alliances between small independent projects this is an important step in creating economies of skill and in providing mutual aid and logistical support shared services and best practices so the letter lines up with one of the key principles used by the Pire Care Collective and Research Project which they use in introduction to their collaboratively written syllabus on the corona crisis to frame care as a political notion they state caring labor needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies when these are taken away, we must claim them back now this is ever so important in the context of school-led communication and the commercialization of knowledge, tools and technologies but it's not only about claiming back resources, tools and technologies or providing open source versions it's also about fundamentally reimagining the workflows, infrastructures and relationalities that make up scholarly publishing to enable relations of care and care labor to be sustained I guess what I'm going to do now is more or less continue where Yannica left off when she was talking about how to potentially re-imagine the workflows, infrastructures and relationalities of publishing so with my work, a matter of course, we sought to do that not always successfully but something we're continually seeking to do in thinking about how we might bring an ethic of care to the book how to make books worth buying and so on how to bring an ethic of care to open access as a movement to our writers to our readers and to those with whom we work those without a direct stake in academic knowledge production the typesetters, web designers, proof readers and so on but what I want to focus more on is some of the other projects that I've been working on recently with other open access book publishers the first of those was a project funded by OpenAir called New Platforms for Open Access Book Distribution this involved a new collaboration between six publishers so Matching Press and Mison Press and Open Book Publishers Open Humanities Press, Punkton Books and Mayfly Books and it was an attempt to think about ways of generating infrastructures that might help us move away from an over-reliance on book processing charges which some of us continue to rely on instead of a number of outputs and some of these are actually ongoing the first of those was a metadata database which was a database that ultimately would enable us to create a shared catalogue and involve all kinds of ways of harmonising our metadata across the different publishers so again, this is us starting to speak in something closer to one voice another, I guess, output was a shared conference presence this in some ways was a more symbolic output than Earth. So this is a conference presence that you can unbox and it showcases the work from all the participating publishers I guess this sort of showcases an ethic that was crucial to the project and that was the value of collaboration over competition we see ourselves very much not in competition with one another but in competition with the far larger and more dominant commercial closed access publishers that dominate the terrain of scholarly publishing another output was the scholar led collective so this again was something that enabled us to speak with a different and more collective voice via Twitter, so we established a Twitter handle which generated a fair amount of attention in the world of scholarly publishing and a web page and so on and I've written a number of collaborative pieces on that and I guess the third output was actually the injunction to attempt to continue working together and see if we could get some funding to do so this led to a £2.8 million bid to Research England and actually a further chop-up bid to the Arcadia Foundation for a project titled Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs and this involved a range of other partners, UC, SB Library, the Digital Preservation Coalition, JISC and so on very happily this bid was successful and I just want to give an overview of what this project is all about because in some ways I think it kind of epitomizes what care for the book might actually look like if you have the potential financial resources to support that so we I guess divided our attention between a range of different aspects in terms of the infrastructures that are required to support open access publishing so the part of the package that I'm involved in is one called Revenue Infrastructures and Management which aims to develop the infrastructure for a community-led fully open consortial funding model to enable libraries to support open access book publishers and this builds on the moves in this direction by the likes of open book publishers and the open library of humanities the second was interested in knowledge exchange and piloting alternative business models exploring all kinds of ways of strengthening the channels of communication that exist between diverse stakeholders that make up or could make up the landscape of open access publishing and this includes most importantly helping established publishers transition to the kinds of open access business models that we are keen to support the third was thinking about community governance if as I've suggested infrastructures are inevitably political then in our view it has to be the scholarly community broadly defined including for example libraries, scholars, learning societies and so on that control these infrastructures and this part of the project aims to research and consult on and develop the policies and procedures needed to support the various forms of activity that were involved in the next work package is interested in creating an open dissemination system thinking about the technical protocol needed to better integrate our books into institutional libraries to enable our books to be found and disseminate more easily amongst the general public and potentially amongst scholarly libraries the next work package is interested in experimental publishing and reuse and impact thinking about expanding the potential for the definition I guess of what an academic book is and thinking about the practical, intellectual and technical challenges that this involves and the final I guess area of focus was thinking about archiving and digital preservation so thinking about how to actually meet the highly complex challenge of preserving open access books in all their complexity including developing the relevant standards and best practices so this I guess is what caring for the book looks like involves caring for all these dimensions of open access book publishing and it's something that I'm very excited to be involved in with Yannicka and hope to be able to come back and report about what we do so the reason that I wanted to talk about the limits of care is because I didn't want to give the impression that we thought that care was in any way a simple solution to the problems of publishing or the more specific problems of open access publishing so what I'm going to do now is just run through three areas where I think that care might have its limits or certainly where care can be challenging to put to productive use the first of those is where care sits in tension with and can at times become overwhelmed by other non-caring logics many of us in the COPM project and in the Associated Scholar-led Consortium work as the name suggests in academic-led presses and we do so at a time in which the economy has been shown to be behaving in all kinds of uncaring ways this of course was at the heart of the recent industrial action in the UK in higher education just by way of some examples a number of colleagues at Matching Press are still in precarious or para-academic positions despite this not being their first choice some of us with more stable contracts struggle with the expectations that our institutions place on us in relation to administration or teaching all this combines to make publishing a difficult activity and especially to do publishing in quite the way that we would want to related to this are all kinds of other non-caring logics that currently dominate academic life notably logics of speed or logics of impact this is often translated for us as academics into the pressure to publish this puts further constraints on our time in combination with some of those other pressures that I mentioned earlier it also affects our authors they can become hesitant to publish open access because of worries about how compatible this might be with instrumental logics of internal and external assessments of research quality engaging in careful publishing can also mean being willing to allow a text to emerge relationally in sometimes iterative dialogue with reviewers and publishers not only can this be slow although some closed access publishers are also sometimes slow and sometimes problematically so but this is a process that can be difficult and fraught with tensions the second area is where care confronts institutional lock-in we're a book publisher and we rely on a range of highly institutionalised third-party services notably Lightning Source to produce our print-on-demand books Amazon to sell hard copies of our books to readers and hopefully soon Google Books to do something similar we also confront institutional lock-in in relation to channels of funding notably libraries and how and whether libraries can direct some of their resources to support open access book publishing now this is something we're explicitly challenging in the coping project but it takes a lot of work and a lot of funding to even attempt to do so not to say that we shouldn't try but this is an enterprise that is inherently wearing really caring for publishing infrastructures therefore is I would suggest an inherently uncertain business in which the futures that you're constantly trying to create can often feel simultaneously tantalisingly close and just out of reach and the third thing I'd like to talk about is the way in which I would suggest care is not something that can be simply conveyed at matching press there have been some occasions I would quite openly admit where our attempts to proceed carefully have broken down and this has led to tensions with authors and editors I'm thinking in particular about a dispute around a book cover in these instances what we have thought of as acting carefully has been interpreted quite differently by those that we work with Ann Marie Moll argues that the logic of care has quote no separate moral sphere that's to say it's not a set of values that can be cleanly applied to a particular setting rather care for the very reason that it's constituted relationally emerges in and through practice a commitment to care therefore does not mean making the world as you would want it to be but rather being committed to dialogue, to negotiation to trial and error and experimentation and sometimes to difficult and painful struggle but hopefully with the ultimate aim of reaching shared and mutual understanding this requires compromises, compromises from publishers compromises from authors and some of the others that we work with as Ann Marie Moll says being for care is perhaps above all being for quote a sticky combination of adaptability and perseverance and in this respect I and my colleagues at Matting Press and in the coping project are we hope adapting and persevering this means that we're working things out but crucially we're doing so with others care of course has many limits and limiting care is often the ultimate act of caring this becomes especially clear where it concerns one of the prime non-caring logics as Joe phrases it within academic publishing namely the extent of volunteer labour that academics do for commercial publishers within a gift economy context which is often neither rewarded nor acknowledged but instead exploited to gain higher profits for shareholders so again we're talking here about the volunteer work we do as reviewers, as editors, as board members as copy editors and as marketeers of our own work this essential care that so many of us provide to sustain our profession, our communities, our universities is a resource that's all too readily taken advantage of now many calls have gone out in the past to demand this kind of volunteer or hidden work is either formally acknowledged or fairly remunerated especially since although they concern calculations for more than 10 years ago and exact calculations are really hard to make due to how untransparent the process is in 2008 the cost of peer review alone has been calculated at more than 1.9 billion pounds however I want to emphasise that I don't think the solution here lies in extending this form of care work into as I outlined earlier the logic of calculation that is by simply adding it to the realm of paid or waged labour on the other hand there are calls to recognise the volunteer publishing work that we do in a different way and to value it and recognise it instead as a form of scholarship within our institutions in other words to seek direct university support now this strategy revolves around arguing that publishing is a part of our scholarly work and not something that we should outsource to recognise it as an activity that benefits scholarship and that we hence value however beyond these two strategies there is a potential third route of limiting or redirecting care following strategies around refusal of work as theorised within autonomous Italian thinking and Marxism feminist theory including by thinkers such as Cathy Weeks Silvia Federici and Valeria Graciana so refusal of work theories which are often framed more around concept of waged and unwaged work rather than volunteer work also often focussed on this dual strategy of either gaining entry into the wage system to show the value of the work we now do voluntarily or gaining social recognition within universities of this volunteer work emphasising what it does to sustain scholarly publishing and research more in general now the issue with both these strategies is their failure to inherently challenge the dominant legitimating discourse of commercially publishing in other words how the system itself needs to change instead a more interesting strategy might be to explore how we can produce and sustain value and perform care work independent of capitalist relations of production and centralized power so this strategy is focused more on challenging the systems of production that sustain commercial academic publishing refusal of work is formulated here as a collective political project that questions the calculative relations of exploitation that underlie publishing more in general it is directed at the larger system of commercial publishing which is designed towards the exploitation of labour and accumulation of profit for stakeholders instead of for the scholarly community it asks how can we provide our care labour to sustain the commons instead instead of it being under control of commercial entities and finally this third strategy of refusal of work is directed at moving away from logics of work and calculation in general towards reimagining and transforming institutions of relations and infrastructures towards commons based forms of publishing which involve and require the invention of new ways of organizing and sharing our work and of making it meaningful sharing time freely and gifting labour is something that underscores many radical open access projects as part of a refusal of work strategy various scholarly and not-for-profit publishing projects actively redirect their volunteer labour towards more progressive forms of publishing for example by shifting it away from commercial profit driven publishers and gifting it to developing not-for-profit open access projects instead as matrank press is doing as well as with the members of the radical open access collective Scholarled and Copin what is needed to enable this is first and foremost a reimagining of what academic collectivity community and commonality is and could be in a digital publishing environment by developing an ethics of care supporting the collective advancement of scholarship and building digital knowledge commons these projects are actively reimagining the relations within the publishing system I hope you found it interesting we're very much welcome your questions and comments Janneke and Jero, I don't know if it's possible for your connections to perhaps put your videos on so people get to see your delightful faces I think I guess if I'm asking you I should perhaps join well I was nervous before I began with the idea of trying to chair the session between the two of you but first of all a huge, huge thank you for really trying to distill the breadth of the work that you're involved in and I think it's a great opportunity to be able to share with you what you've done with all the breadth of the work that you're involved with and give us that structure of the four questions I think when Janneke said them through an email I thought they were fabulous so I will pause for a moment and just sort of put the request out to people as I know there was a huge amount within the presentation this morning but if people could perhaps begin to give some thought as to questions that you might like to formulate I've picked up a few through the chat and I have to say the the mediation of the presentation I thought brought very much some of those infrastructures I think to the four both in terms of how it changed how it informed I look forward to going back and just seeing the original footage too so I think I don't know if that's my connection that's saying it's poor or not but if people have got questions they would like to put in the chat or as Martin said if you want to ask it in person please raise your hand and I will look to my technical wizard to be able to join that but I think there was a couple of things that I think came through and in the chat and I think one of the things that I find super impressive in relation to the work and the endeavour that both of you and your related colleagues are doing is dealing with those tensions understanding I think as you began to sort of phrase it at the end in terms of some of the constraints and the tensions that exist rather than either sort of saying we can't take that into account within the work that we're doing is actually you do sort of use it as a means of progressing some of those ideas and those activities and in particular I guess it's because your work is so grounded within the theoretical paradigm of what you're trying to do but it is brought to life through the practice and I know directly with Yanaka I don't know if you might be able to share something sort of perspectives I think to that but there's clearly synergies perhaps if we start there and then we can see where colleagues come through with chat thank you go for it Yanaka Thanks, I think it's a really good reflection and question in general the extensions we didn't care how we deal with that and I think especially when it comes to open access publishing this has been quite a development being involved in I think it was about 2008 with open access publishing this was still something very new and anything that you would say around openness would be kind of radical and new in that sense and it's been developing a lot and it's now something that's being proposed within funding regimes and policies increasingly too and I think for us this whole kind of the tension is now a mutual kind of starting point towards other elements that are actually important such as for example open infrastructure but I think this move towards openness becoming an open access becoming more accepted has also kind of highlighted these kind of actions that exist within the view of openness and especially also to in relation to elements of care and especially in the kind of research that we've been doing I think the move is going to be what we need to do to sustain these kind of open comments and what kind of interest and communities do we need to kind of work towards that and elements of care and caring for these communities and for the resources that we're building up are really important there but at the same time I think as we both have tried to highlight it's very hard to kind of in the systems that we're working in to develop with. Joe? Yeah thanks. I guess for us right now in terms of sort of this sort of relates to this question of strategies and practice I guess I think what we're finding so inspiring at the moment and Yaniko and I and with him we're working is I guess really seeing what come out genuinely open kind of amazing I mean of course collaboration can go wrong right you can have all kinds of you know tensions with you know interpersonal tensions and so on it's not not to kind of idealize collaboration necessarily but I think if you go into collaboration with a sort of sense of what the possibilities are and as I say with a sort of sense of in some way who you're actually competing with I mean so you know when we're working together you know we're all individual scholar led presses we all have our sort of audiences and so on but we have so much in terms of what we're trying to do that is shared but it makes eminent sense to work together and to explore how you can do things like develop infrastructures together and I think that a really important sort of second area of focus is thinking of I guess is as I was also was suggesting thinking about and questions of infrastructure it's not that you can do that to the exclusion of other domains where you might want to focus your attention when thinking about how to challenge relations you might consider problematic but I think for me and I think for many of my colleagues actually thinking actually about the questions of infrastructure has really been productive because I think there is a tendency for us to take them for granted sometimes yes as people were saying in the comments you know I think in some ways we all kind of know instinctively that infrastructures are political and they are not neutral but if that is the case how do we go about actually changing them and I think they are a site where we can really offer some really important challenges and I think go beyond just seeing open knowledge as a solution to problems that we confront in various different domains but understanding that knowledge has to be carried somewhere has to be hosted somewhere has to pass through all kinds of different spaces and I think infrastructures are a site where we can actually do some really important work practical work for benefits those working on development of those infrastructures and potentially others who then can use or reuse or adapt or remix as infrastructures that that recreate so yeah I guess that's kind of one one kind of area I'd focus and the quick second thing I'd say is they're focusing on practice like Jonathan says I think practice is really important seeing that as a space where care can emerge in dialogue with those with whom you're engaging with as I was sort of saying in the talk yeah and I think thank you both I think one of the I would have thought the difficulties that you'll face and in a way of trying to pull together a couple of the comments through the chat I guess both relate to I think you know there was that sense of things that can often be put in in opposition so you're either research or you teach you either are employed or you're and I think having I guess seen Yannicka I guess emerge and grow both as a PhD student and attend you seem to have never sort of used that as an obstacle there's a reason not to do but as a reason so now that you have this this collective and there's I guess you might say a sense of recognition through with the research England and the the big project that you're now working on of how are you going to deal with that sense of small specialist skills exchange to do with that that sense of scale and I think somebody's put it here you know how do you therefore not fall into the trap in the sense that we perhaps have both as institutions as universities or perhaps as there's you know where we face and in particular when we were trying to do the the disrupted journal of the challenges of the the mega publishing sort of industry so something in I know Joe you said you might mention about about the casual casualization you've got various people in different positions there and each of you at some point or other have both faced and been part of of that there's something some question in there I hope well I wonder whether what part of the question there is about scale and I think Yannicka has talked quite a lot about his questions of scale and we're working with those questions of scale so maybe Yannicka you want to say something about yeah I think one of the things that we've been working a lot around is this idea of scaling small also kind of we're working on for the project and this comes back the whole idea that every time when I was at some point asked to present on open access or an open access book publishing I would always get this question like how does it scale you're talking about all these small projects it will never scale to you know to compete with the big publishers and as if we're trying to compute with the big prophecy that that's not the aim first of all what we've been trying to argue in that is that actually looking together we can keep this kind of diversity in numbers and scale together this element of scaling small and we're really keen to explore this further like look we're in competition with each other and we can create these kind of objectives and alliances and we can learn a lot here from for example the situation in America where this model has been applied from the beginning that before even starting to do open access and we've always been working in this way so yeah for me it's really important that we keep that diversity and that we don't necessarily all have to become mega comrades in order to create the kind of infrastructures and systems that we work with as publishers yeah I'll quickly say just in obviously there's a discussion in the chat around and teaching and research and so on and he also mentioned that I mean I think it's really vitally important to not end up creating a hierarchy between say teaching and research but the point I guess for me is that in all those areas us as publishers but also the authors with whom we work are becoming under huge pressure to deliver teaching at volume at speed in all kinds of ways that are utterly uncaring and ways that many of us find really really difficult and some of the expectations around digital teaching that the universities are placing on people who really don't have the skills necessary at this moment to do that and they're suddenly expected to deliver high quality digital forms of teaching are really I think can be really problematic and been all kinds of cases where you know I mean mental health issues that you know Scott is cropping or certainly it seems to be an issue amongst people working higher education and that but also as you you said Joe I think you mentioned there are those those same challenges and complexities that sit within each of those subdivisions that we might place with ourselves within yeah I mean again in the chat people talking about and ranking systems and quality assessment measures and this these are the kind of non-caring relations that put pressure on the kind of things that we're trying to do and I think we need to be quite open about that and realize that it's not really going to necessarily be feasible for some people to publish open access let's say at an early stage in their career or if they're on a precarious contract I mean it might be but it's something they have to think really really hard about and I certainly wouldn't you know judge anyone for for doing what they have to do to to you know to live a life that is sustainable and they're highly problematic and likely to become even more problematic context of higher education in which in which you know we're working fantastic