Keynote speaker Arwid Lund

Arwid Lund holds a doctoral degree in information studies and is currently a senior lecturer and subject coordinator at Södertörn University in Stockholm.  His research concerns digital peer production, the commons and shapes of openness within cognitive capitalism. His current research projects focus on open science, the Swedish documentalist movement and the open access publishing landscape in the Baltic sea area. 
 

Radical Bibliodiversity Instead of Commercial Academic Publishing

Time is ripe for discussions and actions to empower and scale-up non-commercial academic publishing. The solution to the problems facing academic publishing is not only opening what is closed. The solution goes beyond calls to strengthen the infrastructure for a diamond open access model that is organically linked to academic institutions and university libraries, rather than to commercial publishers. It even goes beyond the Open Science community’s strategies to challenge traditional academic journals with publishing platforms and new document forms. Research funders’ policies need to take more radical measures in relation to commercial publishers’ excessively high Article Processing Charges (APCs), and research agencies and universities need to abandon simple evaluation metrics (e.g. Journal Impact Factor) in relation to the meritocratic academic system. Several governmental and agency policies related to research need to change. University libraries are well positioned to take part in and facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions, that preferable go deeper than seeing non-commercial OA-publishing as only a compensatory move. It is important to challenge the political economy based on commercial publishing by advancing new and sufficiently competitive ways of scaling public sphere academic publishing based on many small and medium-sized publishing entities (that often lacks clear publisher roles). This strategy for a competitive and radical bibliodiversity is still in its infancy, but university libraries could play an important role in materialising it.  An appropriate strategy for university libraries would be to take a proactive, value-based and, if necessary, confrontational attitude as stakeholders in policy discussions, managers of commercial OA-agreements, and as academic publishers.