Affects of Open Access: Platform Building as Affective Method in Scholarly Publishing

This presentation was delivered at the Society for the Study of Affect (SSA) Conference, 2024, on 13 October 2024. The paper's abstract was as follows: A key moment in the history of open access (OA) publishing was the 2002 Budapest declaration.Suffused with techno-utopianism, it invites its readers to collaborate in “building a future in whichresearch and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish”. Two decadeson, Reggie Raju and Jill Claasen, librarians and OA publishers in South Africa, highlight the limits ofsuch naivety. “The OA movement has betrayed Africa” (2022), they write, arguing that the rise ofAPCs, BPCs, transformative agreements, rights retention have combined to “burst the hope bubble”around OA amongst many African scholars, while reinforcing global scholarly inequalities. In thiscontext, I make two suggestions. First, drawing examples from discussions about OA, I argue thatunderstanding the affects and atmospheres within OA publishing, coalescing variously as hope,despair, optimism, disappointment, is vital for building scholarly publishing futures that take seriouslysuch critiques. Second, that we need to understand the practical, ongoing work to build new digitalplatforms that support equitable, bibliodiverse OA publishing practices as themselves affectivemethods. I introduce my own work to build the Open Book Collective, a digital platform and charitythat aims to rebalance structural inequalities in scholarly publishing. I situate this in context of otherinitiatives, including Raju and Claasen’s African Platform for Open Scholarship. In such platforms, wefind hope for alternative OA publishing pathways becoming digitally materialised in interfaces throughwhich pass not just scholarship and socio-economic relations, but also affects of mutual scholarlyengagement. Joe Deville is PI on the Open Book Futures project.