Open Access Week Interview with David Park

The Copim team talks with David Park, co-director of mediastudies.press.

How do you interpret the theme "Community over Commercialisation" in the context of Open Access Week 2024 and your work, and why is it important for the field of open scholarship?

As a media studies scholar, I interpret “Community over Commercialisation” very much in terms my field of study has laid out for me. Numerous traditions claimed by media studies address the clash between growth-oriented and community-based models for how media operate. One point of convergence in these traditions is the unifying idea that once media outlets are put in service of the extractive principles of growth-oriented models, community will suffer. Communities are turned into groups of customers, and they are regarded not in terms of what ideas and curiosities might hold them together, but in terms of what financial value can be extracted from them. The internet, once prized for its potential to replace hierarchies with more horizontal relationships, has in many cases become a tool for the reinforcement of hierarchies. Untethered from the growth demands of much of the scholarly publishing world, the field of open scholarship can operate effectively as a shelter for organic scholarly communities. These scholarly communities then become empowered to reach out beyond themselves to make the kinds of connections with other scholars and with the public that become possible in the non-paywalled world.

The importance of the theme of “Community over Commercialisation” for the field of open scholarship is crucial to recognize. Open Access can often come across as little more than a way to make the output of scholarship—the book, the journal article—more cheaply available to anyone wants to read it. As we know, Open Access is about much more than lower costs. The Open Access movement has been—and must continue to be—dedicated to the ideal of developing communities, including communities of scholars as well as the broader public. The theme this year helps us to make it clear that this is about much more than just lower prices for readers. It is about changing the conditions of publication so that communities can be more than an afterthought in the world of academic publishing. The theme is a lovely way to frame this core issue.

In your opinion, what are the key challenges and drawbacks when commercial interests take precedence in knowledge production, as opposed to prioritizing researchers and the public?

When commercial interests take precedence in knowledge production it takes barely any time to effect an at least partial (and frequently substantial) occlusion of what researchers and the public need and want. What gets jettisoned immediately are what could be called native and developmental interests. Instead of motivating publications to operate as ways to foster curiosity and support the individuals and communities that make good scholarship happen, with an eye on long-term development of communities of interest, commercial interests constrain publishing to focus on short-term gains, inevitably calculated via metrics concerning impact and audience share. Incidentally, many of these metrics are just warmed-over versions of audience measures imported from other for-profit media outfits. If we are to stand up for prioritizing researchers and the public, we must adopt an attitude of at least provisionally sympathetic understanding as we regard the commercial factions in scholarship. They face enormous pressure to keep growing, to assert control, and to tighten their grip on what not long ago was to them a very untamed market. They simply cannot afford to care about prioritizing researchers and the public. It is an ethic of care that we can offer to researchers and the public.

Is there a scenario where commercialization can be aligned with the public interest in the field of open scholarship? If so, what might that look like?

I fear I may disagree with many of my peers on this, but I believe that commercialization itself can be aligned with the public interest. By this I mean that many of the most deleterious tendencies in commercialization derive from pressures to grow, and that commercialization does not always have to be focused entirely on growth. Smaller commercial media operations have been around for a long time, and it makes good sense to consider mediastudies.press and other scholarly OA presses as similar to smaller commercial media operations. Many alternative media outlets are, properly speaking, ‘commercial’ in that they are supposed to make at least enough money through sales to break even.

Just recently, the Charleston Hub posted an installation of their Podcast (Against the Grain) that was dedicated to the findings of a study of book sales amongst (mostly university) publishers, as they start to open up to Open Access publishing. It was a fascinating discussion. One of the most important take-home messages from this podcast was that offering OA books does not seem to have hurt book sales. If we are to regard book sales as off-limits because sales reeks of commercialism, we are only hurting ourselves. We are still trying to distribute media products to those who want them; we just have a different way of selling our goods, and often a more diverse set of means for generating revenue. If the logic of commercialization leads us to find more effective ways to position what we are already doing in a way that helps us to generate greater bibliodiversity in the world of books, or to get us to promote ourselves more effectively, I don’t see much of a problem. The stifling effects of commercialism, I hope, can be kept at bay as long as we don’t start imbibing the afore-mentioned growth imperatives. Perhaps perversely, given our need to compete in a market, OA presses like mediastudies.press could be thought of as closer to the ideal of the free market than many of the dominant corporate presses. If commercialism involves competition, I think our way of doing things is ready to compete. It is the dominant corporate presses that work tirelessly to try to tamp down competition.

How can we encourage a shift toward using community-minded options in knowledge-sharing systems as the default choice, and what are the practical steps that can be taken to achieve this shift?

It’s an essential question! The first step—still necessary in many contexts—is to establish that this *is* a choice. We need to make it clear what the costs of not using community-minded options are. Doing this can easily come off as some kind of judgment of scholars who have built their careers largely through publication in less community-minded venues. This of course misses the point. Encouraging others to consider community-minded options will require first a reminder that scholarship was for a long time more community-minded than it has been during the last few decades. Much of scholarship as we know it—including the founding of almost every field of study in the 21^st century academy—was developed in a far more allowing and community-minded publishing ecology than we presently occupy. We would do well to use the increasingly popular argument that encouraging community-minded options is really a way to “take back” scholarship. Community-minded options were once the norm, but the system has been disrupted by extractive interests. Among other things, this framing of our situation helps lead scholars to listen more carefully to librarians (many of whom have been at the vanguard of the community-supported OA movement) and to others (especially academic administrators) who have real stakes in the game. All of this requires that we make ourselves known. Once we have made ourselves known, of course, we then will need to apply pressure wherever we can: in the institutions where we work, in professional associations, and collectively with policymakers.

How can individuals, institutions, and organizations actively participate in Open Access Week 2024 and contribute to the theme of "Community over Commercialisation" in their local contexts?

Individuals, institutions, and organizations still have a lot to do simply to publicize the realities of Open Access scholarship. Perhaps it will not be long before much more should be demanded, but for now what we can do is a laundry list of little things: talking to our colleagues about the very real promises of Open Access, pointing to the equally real downsides of the consolidated commercial presses, and showing everyone the benefits (including consistency with long-standing academic values, higher rates of citation, convenient course adoption, simple worldwide reach) of being part of the Open Access world. To use the language of commercialization once again: we have a great product to sell at a relatively low price. Sometimes the burden of trying to reset scholarly publishing with Open Access can put one in a funk. I remind myself frequently that there is no need to get down about it; the Open Access movement is thriving and if we hold together and keep building it, using every tool at our disposal, we will make great strides.

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