The Enclosure of Scholarly Infrastructures, Open Access Books & the Necessity of Community

[originally posted on June 7, 2019]

In June 2018, punctum and 4 other open-access book publishers in Europe (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and Open Humanities Press) formed the ScholarLed collective:

The aim of the collective is to explore the potential of working together. This includes developing systems and practices that allow presses to provide each other with forms of mutual support, ranging from pooled expertise to shared on- and offline infrastructures. Members of the consortium each retain their distinct identity as publishers, with different audiences, processes, business models and stances towards Open Access. What they share, however, is a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, to resisting the marketization of academic knowledge production, and to working collaboratively rather than in competition.

You can read more about our mission and strategic goals at our website, and in the coming months, we will have announcements to share about our projects and further collaborations. In the meantime, this is our first statement as a collective.

A Statement from ScholarLed on Knowledge Unlatched’s “Open Research Library”

[Cross-posted from ScholarLed Blog]

… [e]verything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures.
~ Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, and Cameron Neylon, “Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures”

On May 16th, Knowledge Unlatched (KU) announced a new initiative to develop and launch the Open Research Library (ORL), which they envision as a “a one-stop hub” for “all available [OA] book content under one search and hosting interface” that will also provide “corresponding catalogue data…to library systems.” It is KU’s claim that they are responding to the wishes of researchers and librarians who have expressed to them a desire for “all” Open Access (OA) book content to be accessible “in one place, for easy discovery and user-friendly navigation as well as further dissemination into third party systems.” KU further claims that the ORL is a collaboration “with publishers and libraries worldwide.” Claiming to be working in partnership with publishing and library communities, they are asking libraries to help fund the ORL at a rate of $1,200/year (at a 3-year lock-in), for which they will receive “a set of [value-added] exclusive services,” such as micro-branded library sites, COUNTER statistics, catalog records, and the like. This raises the worrisome question of whether or not the ORL engages in the business practices of “openwrapping” and “openwashing” (monetizing services, engagement, and infrastructural support around openly licensed content). KU has long positioned itself as a values-driven, community-minded initiative that shares a mission with research libraries to make knowledge accessible to the world, without barriers, although it has not been forthcoming, nor publicly transparent, about its transition in 2016 from a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) registered in the UK under Frances Pinter’s leadership, to a for-profit (GmbH) company registered in Germany under Sven Fund’s managing directorship. In a news update issued in March 2016, KU presented this transition as an “expansion” into a “new branch,” when in fact Fund, under the auspices of his for-profit, “strategic investments” firm fullstopp, was acquiring and transferring the majority of KU’s “assets” to his own for-profit portfolio of publishing services, leaving behind in the UK a completely separate research and analysis group focused on ecosystems for OA monographs, KU Research, which operates independently of KU.1

We share the concerns of our fellow ScholarLed consortium member Open Book Publishers (OBP) regarding KU’s under-publicized acquisition by fullstopp, and also question KU’s moves since 2016 into what increasingly looks like OA platform capitalism and rent-seeking, whereby those businesses, such as Facebook and Google, that are claiming to be “neutral arbiters and spaces of informational exchange” are, in fact, “siphoning value from socio-cultural activity,” and “rather than producing new value,” they “simply coordinate virtual properties and charge for their use.” Most worryingly, these platforms confuse “capital-flow and social form, rearranging the relationship of profit to community (and therefore class), and of intelligence to organization.”2 We are witnessing an important moment in history where platforms are emerging as a “third institutional form, along with states and markets.”3 ScholarLed was formed by a collective of OA books presses (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books), who share a commitment to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships, to resisting the marketization of academic knowledge production, and to working collaboratively rather than in competition. With Heather Joseph, we want a more “distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication” and we stand against the co-option of OA publishing by the “third” institutional form of platforms and platform capitalism. And with OBP, we agree that KU “is not an organisation that works generously with other OA projects – indeed its aggressive approach, exemplified in the creation of ORL, actively damages these organisations and impoverishes the wider OA community.”

At first glance, the Open Research Library feels like a natural outcome of KU’s work to “unlock” knowledge and make it as discoverable and accessible as possible to a global readership (with the support of consortial library funding). In an interview in Publishing Perspectives, Sven Fund indicated that “one of the key parameters or goals” in creating the ORL “was to not replicate what’s already there, not to build another layer of something that already exists.” Unfortunately, there are striking contradictions here. First is the fact that there already exist multiple highly-regarded open repositories and directories offering access to OA book content, including the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library. The latter already houses close to 10,000 open books in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including titles that KU itself has “unlatched” from a broad diversity of academic presses. OAPEN and KU both list the other as a partner on their respective websites, and all of the books that KU has “unlatched” since its inception are curated at OAPEN and are also discoverable via the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), which currently serves as the online catalog and discovery service for close to 17,000 OA book titles (as of May 2019). Both OAPEN and DOAB are non-profit, community-led, university-supported organizations that have gained wide trust in the OA community, and it is worth noting that over 110 academic publishers entrust the discoverability, dissemination, and preservation of their OA titles with OAPEN, which provides a vital service to libraries worldwide, including the open provision of catalogue records, usage metrics, and metadata.4

It is therefore clearly concerning that KU is now building an “open research library” that will be replicating and cannibalizing the efforts of OAPEN and DOAB (including offering services to libraries that OAPEN and DOAB are already providing), not to mention that KU also seeks to extract institutional funding for the aggregation of OA content and supposed “value-added” services that have already been provided by OA publishers in partnership with organizations such as OAPEN (such as the consortial library support programs of Open Book Publishers, Open Library of Humanities, and punctum books, among others). This is especially jarring when one considers that another of KU’s recently announced projects is KU Open Funding, a matchmaking service and “central database” that helps researchers and libraries identify suitable publishers for OA books, with KU taking a commission for all successful matches that involve publishing fees (to be “deposited” with KU by libraries). There is a worrying drift here in KU’s operations from a community-minded, non-profit initiative invested in helping libraries and publishers to work collaboratively to open front- and back-list book titles, to an aggressively competitive commercial firm intent on pursuing a centralized platform for the delivery of multiple varieties of OA content and associated “services” (KU has also recently moved into journal flipping and analytics). But perhaps we should not be surprised since, in an interview in Against the Grain in 2017, Fund indicated that one of the strategic goals for KU would be precisely to monopolise: to “create a neutral marketplace so that everybody can take advantage of just having this one infrastructure technologically but also one salesforce, one contact partner to talk to.”

This brings us to KU’s claim that they are building the Open Research Library (ORL) with publishers and libraries. In their beta release of the ORL, there are 15 “curated” collections of titles from a variety of academic publishers: Springer Open, Open Book Publishers, Manchester University Press, Cambridge University Press, Brill, and De Gruyter, among others. Investigation has revealed that neither Open Book Publishers nor Springer Open were aware of the ORL and had not, in fact, collaborated with KU on this initiative.5 This is the behaviour, again, of a rent-seeker taking advantage of open content, not a collegial partner working to make OA books available to all. It is worth mentioning, again, that all of the titles curated within the ORL, along with their associated metadata, catalog records (etc.), are already hosted and curated by OAPEN. In a webinar that KU hosted on May 21st to respond to community concerns over the ORL, when asked why they would duplicate (and potentially compete with) the efforts of other organizations such as OAPEN, they indicated that other platforms for hosting OA books content are inadequate to the job of hosting all of the different types of content that are, and would be, available. They mentioned by way of a specific example that MUSE Open, a Mellon-funded OA books initiative of Project Muse, only hosts non-profit publishers, and thus there is supposedly a need for a centralized platform that would provide access to OA books from commercial platforms such as Springer Open alongside books from non-profit presses such as Open Book Publishers. Yet, again, OAPEN already accomplishes this! On the other hand, Fund also indicated in the webinar that he believes “other” OA books repositories have certain flaws relative to 3 areas: the ingest of books is too slow, the content is not “granular” enough, and Biblioboard (the for-profit company that provides the underlying software for the ORL) is technologically more sophisticated than whatever technologies other repositories are using.6

It has to be asked: is it, in fact, a public and universal community “good” that all OA books be aggregated in one, central repository? Do we in the OA community, in fact, want there to be one central “marketplace” for both the funding and aggregation of OA books content? Do we really want only “one salesforce” and “one contact person” for OA content, whether journals or books? At a time when it feels critical, within the landscape of scholarly communications, to reduce our dependence on proprietary platforms and service providers, does it make sense now to throw our collective support into a “one-stop” platform for all OA books content worldwide (a platform, we might add, that does not appear to have been developed in a transparent dialogue with a majority of stakeholders in the OA publisher community)? ScholarLed emphatically believes we should be looking instead to participate in the collective, community-led development of heterogeneous but also networked and distributed infrastructures for OA books that would allow the integration and interoperability of a multiplicity of OA books initiatives at various scales, yet would also “scale small” where that is desired and beneficial, such as in certain highly localized contexts. In other words, we value diversity that incorporates and thrives on different scales of alliance and interoperability in the OA books landscape, and we do not want a centralized, monopolised OA monoculture such as that presently “on offer” from Knowledge Unlatched. Of course, once scholarly works are affixed with certain Creative Commons (CC) licenses, anyone may (within a range of freer and more restrictive parameters) aggregate OA materials into a “one-stop hub” and even potentially monetize that venture (although the troubling question remains whether or not KU can actually monetize OA book content that carries a CC license with the “NC”/Noncommercial designation7). The more troubling issue here is how, historically, KU has positioned itself as a member of a community devoted to collective and collaborative forms of, and infrastructures for, Open Knowledge. Supposedly neither on the publisher’s side nor the library’s, KU presents itself as a “neutral” and “agnostic” broker between the two, yet, at this moment, KU appears to be emerging as a competitor in what it views as an OA “marketplace.” As OPERAS shared in their own statement,

While we can agree with [KU’s] observation that “free access to scientific content is often limited due to the fragile infrastructure around it”, we do not think this initiative is helpful in strengthening the Open Access infrastructure for monographs…. In our opinion, the ORL does not meet the criteria for open infrastructures. On the contrary…the approach of this platform closely resembles well-known internet strategies to quickly achieve a dominant position by aggregating all available content and offering a free service to the community, while aiming for a lock-in of users and stakeholders.

With OPERAS, we believe the best way to serve the scholarly community and the public good is through non-competitive collaboration and expertise-sharing among those who share a common cause (Public Knowledge / Public Commons). We embrace with them the principles of “open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed” infrastructures for open scholarly communications. We call on the wider Open Access and Library communities to come together to oppose the commercialized centralization and proprietary enclosure of open books as represented by KU’s Open Research Library. We are not opposed to for-profit actors in the landscape of scholarly communications, especially when those actors support equitable and collaborative forms of knowledge exchange and are not just intent on extracting capital from libraries for the sake of profits only. However, we insist on “open knowledge for the public good” as that in which we invest our highest care and for which we will commit ourselves to collective stewardship. With OPERAS, we also believe “that vital infrastructures supporting Open Science should not fall in the hands of commercial operators.” Further, “[T]hese infrastructures should be a collective responsibility of stakeholders in scholarly communication.”

Therefore, we call on Knowledge Unlatched to reconsider its position vis-à-vis its newly launched Open Research Library and to recommit itself to investing, collaboratively, in truly open infrastructure, as enunciated by the newly launched project, “Invest in Open Infrastructure”:

… the existing scholarly infrastructure…is dominated by vendor products that take ownership of the scholarly process and data as well as by North Atlantic dominance and digital colonialism. The goals of these vendors is largely to generate profit, which stands in stark contrast to the values of mission-driven educational and research organisations where innovation and open access are central. These products favor vendor lock-in and monopoly models by nature, despite a clear incompatibility with the scholarly values of our communities. We intend to create a new open infrastructure system that will enable us to work in a more integrated, collaborative and strategic way. It will support global connections and consistency where it is appropriate, and local and contextual requirements where that is needed.

If KU’s intent is to compete with organizations such as OAPEN Library (heretofore KU’s partner), and even with the presses (such as Open Book Publishers) whose books have so generously been provided to the public domain (and who also depend on libraries for support), they cease to be a partner in the Open Access community and emerge, instead, as a parasitic competitor in a dystopian “knowledge economy.”8 The presses of ScholarLed affirm together that we reject this parasitic “knowledge economy” and with Invest in Open Infrastructure, we instead “imagine a world in which communities of researchers, scholars, and knowledge workers across the globe are fully enabled to share, discover, and work together.” Without walls. Without borders. Without bouncers. Without tariffs.