Undoing Scholarship: Towards an Activist Genealogy of the OA Movement | Rebekka Kiesewetter | Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Volume 23, Number 2, June 2020, pp. 113-130.

This paper tentatively proposes an approach to academic Open Access publishing in which academic and activist work is not perceived as something divided but as something that embodies different aspects of the same praxis online and offline.
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Go to the profile of Pablo Markin
over 3 years ago

Though the claims this article makes cannot necessarily be validated empirically, it does seem to describe qualitatively, tentatively large-scale shifts in the higher education and academic research industries concomitant to the rise of the Open Access movements, such as the growing predominance of adjunct faculty, short-term contracts and budget pressures. Thus, it is not inconceivable that, as universities shift the focus of their policies from a supply-side orientation, e.g., comprehensive subscription deals with key publishers with cost structures underwritten by government funding and student fees, to a demand-side one, e.g., a stress on the cost-less Open Access to research results that reduces associated financial commitments in the long run, one can, indeed, perceive this process as not dissimilar to neoliberal policies in terms of its justifications and outcomes.