Gary:

A warm welcome to all of you, and thanks for joining us for this 2-day conference on Radical Open Access. We’re going to begin by saying a little bit about theme of the conference. We’ll then give you some of the practical information you’re going to need over the next two days.

First of all, the good news: open access has at long last entered the mainstream in the global West and North. The European Commission has made open access the general principle for Horizon 2020, the EU's Research & Innovation funding programme for 2014-2020. Meanwhile, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced in 2013 it was directing all federal agencies with a research budget of over $100 million to produce plans to make the results of their research accessible to the public within a year of publication.

The not so good news, of course, is that it’s a certain version of open access that is being taken up. Universal open access to research is currently being promoted by policy makers, funders and commercial publishers alike primarily as a means of serving the knowledge economy

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and helping to stimulate market competition. As we say in our conference abstract, this version has become so dominant that even those on the left of the political spectrum who are critical of open access are presenting it in much the same terms: as merely assisting with the ongoing process of privatising knowledge, research and the university.

This leaves many of us who see in open access a means of affirmatively disrupting the increasing commercialisation of knowledge and research through the development of different forms of scholarly production and publication, with a decision to make:

Do we ‘work with the grain’ of neoliberalism’s take-over of open access, as many in the open access movement are doing for a variety of reasons - not least among them the possibility of having access to funding?

Do we accept that, despite whatever interesting potential it may once have had, open access – like open source, open education and open science - has today been pretty much co-opted by the neoliberal mainstream, and just give up on it as a concept and practice, directing our time and attention elsewhere instead?

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Do we carry on doing what we’ve been doing – working, often co-operatively and collaboratively, ‘against the grain’, to publish open access journals, run open access presses, explore multimodal forms of scholarly communication, experiment with different ideas of the author, originality, fixity, the book, the university and so forth – and operate more or less independently, without much hope or need of funding and support?

Or do we accept that such domination and incorporation is to be expected – it’s just what politics is! Do we therefore refuse to concede open access, and instead struggle over its history and meaning in an attempt to redefine, reclaim and repurpose it? And do we do so not least by emphasizing some of the different, more intellectually and politically exciting, ‘alternative’ ways of understanding open access that are currently available around the world? What, for shorthand, might be called radical open access, even if the term ‘radical’ is not without its problems, we know. (Does it confine us to too narrow an understanding of radicality; or to working within open access, rather than entering new arenas?)

These are just some of the questions we’re looking to discuss over the next two days.

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Of course, given the title and make-up of this conference, you probably already have a sense of where our sympathies lie. Indeed, we’ve organised this event precisely to bring together a broad range of those who are interested in - and often already experimenting with – more radical forms of open access.

Janneke:

For our part, what we’re calling radical open access is not a model to be implemented in different settings, or one-size-fits-all solution to a specific problem (how to achieve universal, free, online access to research, for example). If democracy, for Etienne Balibar, is a permanent struggle for democratisation, so radical open access can be understood as a series of on-going critical struggles – not least around issues of access, experimentation, and self-reflexivity. It is thus contingent and contextual, consisting of a heterogeneity of different groups, peoples, institutions and projects, all with their own affordances and value systems, each inventing their own singular ways of responding to their community's needs. 

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So we envision radical open access, less as a homogenous project with a fixed end-goal, and more as a process of continuous critical self-reflection and resistance. However, because we want to open things up, rather than close them down from the start, we’re not going to say too much at this point about what radical open access is for us. We might, however, come back to say more about this toward the end of the conference. Instead, we see this event as providing us with an opportunity to both: explore the diversity of exciting open access methods, models and approaches that are currently available - in the arts, humanities and social sciences especially; and to discuss some of the possible futures for open access.

In keeping with this approach, our arrangement of the conference has been informed by a sense of parity. We don’t have any keynotes, only panels, and we’ve done our best to give everyone more or less the same amount of time to speak. We’ve tried to have a democratic mix of early career scholars as well as established speakers. And we’re making extensive use of Skype so as not to exclude those who, for whatever reason, couldn't travel to be here with us today.

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But this sense of parity and inclusion also extends to all of you as attendees, and we’ll do our best to create an atmosphere in which you’ll feel able, and indeed, encouraged, to contribute. We’ve designed the panels so there’s plenty of time at the end for questions and comments. We’ve made sure there are decent breaks for coffee and lunch throughout the two days – we know that’s when the interesting things happen at conferences really, in the in-between spaces. Our final panel has also been designed with the idea of giving everyone an opportunity to speak, too.

So, as part of any Closing Remarks on Tuesday, we thought we’d explore whether or not we want to form some sort of a radical open access network or community. Is this desirable, or even possible? And if so, how we might go about it – so that it actually works, rather than just being something nice to say at the end of a conference.

We’ve asked Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation to say a few words and share his experiences on the subject to kick off the discussion, and also help us out in responding to any issues raised. But other than that we thought we’d leave this panel open for your ideas and thoughts. With apologies to David and Sigi, the names that are attached to it at the moment are really just placeholders.

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So, if you’d like to contribute to this final panel, regardless of whether you’re one of our ‘official speakers’, or whether you’re here because you thought the conference looked kind of interesting, feel free at any point over the next two days to let us know. We can then either put you on it, give you some time to speak, or otherwise make a comment or raise some suggestions.

Now for some practicalities, tea/coffee and lunch will be upstairs, where you have registered. Toilets are to your right next to the Media Loan Shop. The doors to go outside of the building function via card access, so be aware of this when you go outside to get some air or smoke; we will try to have people at the doors during break times to let you in. You can find the schedule for today and tomorrow here and in your programme booklet. We can only provide Internet access via Eduroam unfortunately, but we hope that will suffice.

If you use Twitter, the hashtag for the conference is #radicalOA. We are also streaming the conference via Periscope and Twitter, although this is very much a first

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experiment for us. But do feel free to share the streaming link with your followers or other people you think might be interested in following the conference as it unfolds. The conference will be streamed via the conference Twitter account: @radicalOA, so be sure to follow us and retweet the stream to your followers.

Before we start of with the first panel, we would like to extend our gratitude to a few people and institutions that have made this conference possible. This includes The Centre for Disruptive Media, Coventry University’s School of Art and Design, The Department of Media and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab. But also Sarah Kernaghan-Andrews, Craig Goddard, (2 other AV technicians), Denise Demicoli, Josh Price, Sadie Kerr, Mark Dennis, Nanette Brock, Matthew Hawkins, Rebecca Koss and Davina Bhakta, and of course our speakers and the presses and projects they represent. Most of all however we want to thank you to you for coming today to discuss these important issues with us.

Now let me introduce the first panel’s moderator to you, Rupert Gatti. Dr. Rupert Gatti is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is a Director of Studies in Economics. His published academic work includes microeconomic analysis of competition in online markets, game theory and search theory. Rupert is a co-founder and co-director of Open Book Publishers. Open Book Publishers was founded in 2008 by a small group of

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academics at the University of Cambridge. Since then, they have grown into an international network of scholars who believe that it is time for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible.

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