Book Reviews

Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. 472p. Paper, $30.00 (ISBN 978-0-2625-3624-0).

As an academic librarian firmly ensconced in the niche of library publishing (with its preference for open access), I (and perhaps you) have read a number of edited volumes centering on the intersection of libraries and scholarly communications that examine OA from practical and theoretical angles. While not specifically centered on libraries, this volume comes as a welcome update to earlier treatments: broader in scope, far more inclusive in the diversity of its contributors, and more fully in conversation with the wider political and social environment of the moment. Any actor in scholarly publishing will find a wealth of material to consider here, but perhaps especially academic librarians working in publishing, open access, or scholarly communications, who increasingly find their disciplines aligned with the aims of Eve and Gray’s monograph.

This is an edited collection of short, modular essays on aspects of the “translation of publishing into the digital space, and the subsequent imaginaries, practices, and infrastructures of ‘openness’ that have logically followed.” The editors provide a detailed introduction and a short conclusion framing the work, as well as a statement on terminology that acknowledges the difficulty of honoring every author’s agency regarding how we name geographies of oppression. Supporting the work are a collective bibliography, a brief index, and especially an extensive glossary, which acknowledges the impenetrability of specialist language in scholarly communications and suggests atomization of a topic requiring reassembly.

The title also signals the editors’ contention that scholarly communication in the current moment correlates with open access. The essays in this volume again and again reference the foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative statement and proceed from there to extend, complicate, challenge, and reform the histories and futures of scholarly communications in general and open access in particular. Twenty-five chapters are gathered into six loose themes: colonial influences, epistemologies, publics and politics, archives and preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities, determined with input from peer reviewers (colonial influences and epistemologies, for example, weren’t in the original arrangement but were drawn out in review). The chapters in these thematic units often together make a narrative, from history or problem to suggested future. Many of the authors will be familiar to those who have been paying attention, and the editors were intentional in soliciting a wealth of voices from across both the globe and the continuum of possible identities.

Eve’s own brief chapter on digital reading imagines some of the positivist technological solutions that he has lamented as missing in the collection. Hindsight finds him recharacterizing the project as a question of ethical response to the economies of prestige that motivate the current closed-access scholarly communications models. This analysis is in contrast to his and Gray’s initial aims: a critical examination of the histories of the open access movement, presented in shorter pieces that might fit within a policy maker’s available attention span, so that we might reevaluate what those histories mean in the present moment. In some sense the collection meets all of these goals, but its real strength is its potential for, well, reassembly: the attentive reader would be hard-pressed not to begin putting these various essays in conversation with one another and with whatever preconceptions about scholarly communication she brings with her as she reads, and then imagining steps forward in light of those dialogs.

The editors make some of these connections for the reader, pointing from one essay to another in the bodies of each text. Essays that challenge each other are at times juxtaposed. Gray’s cheerful survey of a range of infrastructures, wanting slightly for commercial awareness, is followed by Andrews’ thorough examination of the commercial enclosure of open access. Salo argues that the “text hegemony” created by humanist publishing practices precludes the needed preservation of whole swaths of digital evidence; Rév immediately questions whether making archives of evidence digitally available doesn’t do more harm than good. Readers will quickly reassemble essays into new thematic units, perhaps re-establishing “histories” versus “futures,” or pulling the various chapters from Hathcock, Novwiskie, Nkoudou, Albornoz et al., and Smith et al. together with the “epistemologies.” Chapters engaged in the essential work of challenging our (and our field’s) entrenched colonialism, racism, classism, and sexism are distributed throughout, as are chapters advocating for values-based strategies and practices that might inspire new ways forward. Particularly instructive, to my mind, are the chapters from Becerril-García and Aguado-López, Packer, and Babini outlining the open access infrastructures in Latin America, which predate the BOAI declaration and which are now under threat from the forces that seek to co-opt OA for commercial scholarly publishing via APC-based neoliberal policies.

The final thematic group, “global communities,” could just as easily have been called “ethics,” and it is my sense that these are meant to speak to the philosophical heart of the matter—do we want something different than the status quo, and if so what, and why?—though in truth this question is everywhere addressed in the volume. In any case, it’s apparent that the editors and authors are together striving toward a future where the utopian ethical imperative that initially motivated open access is realized in an equitable scholarly communications system that dignifies knowledge makers everywhere, structured for “positive change and renewal” as Eileen Joy puts it. Whether this is done by uncovering the true histories of misunderstood aspects of open access and scholarly publishing; challenging the inequities, oppressions, exploitations, and erasures inherent in the current system; demonstrating the possibilities for new ways of affecting scholarly communications through case studies and existing alternative models; or advocating for possible futures, in total these essays demand a pause. This cultural moment is an inflection point where radical imagination—inspired and encouraged by these 25 chapters—might just nudge the enterprise in another direction, reassemble its fragments into something new, something that serves rather than exploits scholars and scholarship, something more in line with the initial utopian promise of OA.—Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University