Dr. Marcel Knöchelmann

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review. These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production. As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned [...]

Without specifying its meaning or context, openness remains an empty category. It commonly evokes a positive sentiment, but what does it mean to say: We are opening up this or that? And what does it disguise? It even compares with excellence in this respect: a word that is en vogue to be thrown into debates about the future of the academy. It can be claimed, in this sense, that we are excellent in our scholarship if we produce more information, and we are more excellent if this information is open. We are also more democratic if we are open since we share our information. ...

Open access (OA) in the Global North is considered to solve an accessibility problem in scholarly communication. But this accessibility is restricted to the consumption of knowledge. Epistemic injustices inhering in the scholarly communication of a global production of knowledge remain unchanged. This underscores that the commercial or big deal OA dominating Europe and North America have little revolutionary potential to democratise knowledge. Academia in the Global North, driven by politics of progressive neoliberalism, can even reinforce its hegemonic power by solidifying and legitimating contemporary hierarchies of scholarly communication through OA. [...]

Germany as a unified site for science and scholarship aims to enlarge its share of open access publications by means of transformative agreements with large publishers. This, however, is but a transformation in the sense of a soft evolution within the existing system. It prohibits the notion of equity that was once foundational for open access. The future of the library seems to be reduced to the role of the local administrator instead of it being an integrative institution with the ability to change the system.