Bell, Kirsten (2024) Open access and the subjunctive mood in scholarly publishing. In: Kapferer, Bruce, and Gold, Marina, (eds.) Egalitarian Dynamics Liminality and Victor Turner S Contribution to the Understanding of Socio Historical Process. Berghahn Books, New York, NY, USA, pp. 272-289.

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Abstract

[Extract] Once considered ‘hare-brained utopianism’, open access to academic scholarship has today become an ‘institutional imperative of science’ (Willinsky 2016). Although guerrilla versions of open access abound,1 it is increasingly being mandated by research funders and government agencies, and is widely embraced by corporate publishers themselves. For example, Research England has made it a requirement that all publications submitted as part of the national research audit of higher education are freely accessible and widely available, based on the premise that ‘[o]pen access research brings benef i ts to researchers, students, institutions, governments, public bodies, professionals and practitioners, citizen scientists and many others’ (Research England 2019). Th us, liberal-democratic versions of open access sit side by side with more radical, critical versions and those based on the logic of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Adema 2015). As Eve (2014: 7) observes, supporters of open access are today just as likely to be conservative politicians as unequivocal egalitarians, and advocates oft en fi nd themselves accused of being an anti-corporate Marxist one day, and a neoliberal sell-out the next.

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