1 of 36

“T”A’s & THEIR DISCONTENTS

Library Publishing Forum 2022

Slide content is CC-BY Brianne Selman, design modified from SlidesCarnival & images from UnSplash

2 of 36

HELLO!

Brianne Selman

University of Winnipeg Scholarly Communications & Copyright Librarian

Slide content is CC-BY Brianne Selman, design modified from SlidesCarnival & images from UnSplash

2

I live and work in Winnipeg, in the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree Nations. Treaty 1, signed in 1871, took this territory from seven local Anishinaabe First Nations in order to make the land available for settler use and ownership. Winnipeg is also the home of Idle No More, #JusticeForEishaHudson, and many other movements towards indigenous sovereignty and justice. This acknowledgement is an expression of respect and appreciation for these ancestors and their present-day relatives, and in support of indigenous land and livelihood defenders.

Today starts with a rapid fire coverage of transformative agreements and their discontents. I’m using “transformative agreements” in a big-tent way, though many of them are now read & publish. I proposed a fairly sweeping subject for a 45 minute talk, and don’t necessarily think I was successful in cutting it down to 15 and still having something to say, but I am trying to pull on different threads.

At the outset though, I will thank Dave Ghamandi and the collective Camille Nous for pushing my thinking on this.

My always expanding Zotero Library on TAs & Offsetting agreements is at: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2420384/transformative__offset_agreements_alternatives/

I gave a talk along similar lines to CRKN, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, our nation-wide consortia, back in 2020. Since then, I’ve been thinking about potential better ways to group and organize the various (and many) different reasons folks oppose “Transformative” Agreements. I think there is value in this, for me, at least, in looking at how we are still trying to articulate the problems, and then digging deeper into some of these underlying structures.

If you have a TA Bingo card, you are looking at one of them - my bonus slides include those arguments mapped to different quadrants including cost, transition to OA, scholarly values, and economic models. I have also included in the bonus slides a diversion where, for a while, I thought I would do a Sesame Street style framework, brought to you by the letter C. Ultimately, however, I returned to the original schema - but wanted to make the underlying *assumptions* of some of the threads of critique more obvious.

I want to talk about some of the underlying assumptions in our critiques of TAs, and this is partially influenced by Jana Bacevic’s work on the moral economy of open access, and Knowing Neoliberalism, so I’ll be looking at some normative assumptions as well as economic assumptions.

As Bacevic points out, knowledge itself - as both a good and a good thing - is often positioned as outside of what we justify, and also what we critique. I may be able to touch on knowledge production in some ways here, but I am mindful of that being a still-unquestioned output in all of this.

Scholarly critiques, to get meta, such as this one, are situated in power relations of recognition, classification, and valuation, and all of this is engaging in the (re)production of that system. I think we all recognize that by this point, and I don’t want to glibly say that by recognizing it I am somehow outside of it, or the act of critique is above it - or that critique itself is more valuable than the people doing *the work*. I am concerned with the top level conversations (with consortia, with school Presidents, with publishers both internal and external) that focus maybe too much on these levels of critique, and don’t get to hear about difference, plurality, non-best-practices-that-are-still-fine-practices, and all the happy little parts of the scholarly publishing ecosystem going about doing their own thing.

I’m also mindful of a few things about ‘critique’ itself - mainly the tendency to over generalize, which I am definitely doing today, and the tendency to think that critique itself is enough to rename, and thus remake, the ideological terrain - but the act of changing how we interpret the world does not always propel us towards changing the material world itself, there is work to be done.

3 of 36

TRANSFORMATIVE GOALS

3

Country/ Institution’s output is fully OA
Costs are “Contained”/ Unified
Money from non-OA is shifted to OA
Eventual full transition of scholarly publishing

So as the starting point for the Canadian focus, I looked at a number of the expressed goals of “Transformative” Agreements - from places like JISC and various groups from ESAC who had talked to CRKN in the past. (CRKN themselves align their pursuit of “OA Agreements with their strategic plan: https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/open-access-publishing . https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/strategic-plan-2019-2024 . It is also related to their Licensing Principles: https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/crkn-licensing-principles. Canada is not currently part of Plan S). This is how ESAC define transformative agreements – a business model, that takes the amount of money currently paid for subscriptions and applies it to Open Access, to “accelerate the transition to Open Access”. ESAC - https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/

The goals seem to boil down to four main goals: 1) a particular country or institution wants to have 100% output fully OA, 2) they want this to be done in a way that at least unifies, but maybe even contains, reading and publishing costs,3) they want money from non-OA publishing shifted to OA, and 4) most have some sort of vision of this leading to a full transition of scholarly publishing to all OA.

So holding “T”As up to these internal goals serves as a useful framework for further grouping the *criticisms* of TAs. These critiques are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though some may end up contradictory when we boil down their assumptions.

These goals are a synthesis of most of the folks we heard from at CRKN 2019, as well as JISC in the UK. (Bibsam [Sweden], UNIT [Norway], Projekt DEAL [Germany], University of California and Max Planck – all members of ESAC, Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, hosted by Max Planck Digital Library). Interesting that many have announced increased support for national platforms

- Latin America isn’t doing TAs – they never had big deal subscriptions in the first place, and instead invest in a large scale publishing endeavour across the continent supported by Universities and shared infrastructure.

(and are VERY concerned with how heavily TAs prioritize APCs: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/05/20/the-commercial-model-of-academic-publishing-underscoring-plan-s-weakens-the-existing-open-access-ecosystem-in-latin-america/ )

“SciELO is a program based on international cooperation, in which nations work together to adopt common technical standards for academic publishing” in Chapter 21, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/Reassembling-Scholarly-CommunicationsHistories

- In Africa, African Open Journals and AESA are looking to replicate this kind of system, largely with journals hosted and supported by Universities and societies.

Interestingly, seeing some of the ESAC countries start to build their own national publishing infrastructure -

https://www.kb.se/samverkan-och-utveckling/nytt-fran-kb/nyheter-samverkan-och-utveckling/2020-04-30-swedish-open-access-journals-on-joint-platform.html
https://openjournals.nl/
https://tidsskrift.dk/
https://journal.fi/

- And of course we have *our* own.

NextGen Library Project has some alternatives: https://educopia.org/growing-a-forest/

PlanS, of course, have the criteria for Transformative Journals: https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/

4 of 36

OUTPUT IS FULLY OA - ACCESS

4

5 of 36

OA MEASURMENT CRITIQUES

Global OA rise is due more to Green in Europe, and Diamond in Latin America & Africa

5

TA’s increase hybrid, and not much else (NL)

Scholars at Curtin University in Australia recently https://elifesciences.org/articles/57067 released a meta-analysis of global OA outputs, finding in general large increases in OA, but showing anglo North America is lagging behind.

Green OA (repositories) are largely driving Europe and North America’s OA growth. Green OA in Europe is largely driven by much stronger funder requirements, as well as things like the REF in the UK, which require researchers to deposit in repositories if they want their publications to count. In their analysis of the Netherland’s transformative agreements, the researchers found that it only increased publication in those hybrid journals, not overall gold Open Access.

In Latin America and Africa, however, the Gold/diamond Open Access publishers continue to contribute to their excellence. Gold/ Diamond OA in Latin America has historically been driven by SciELO, a strong network of university supported publishers, who transitioned to full OA early on.

This analysis shows three key things – while OA continues to grow, no one is at 100%, transformative agreements are responsible for very little of this growth, and that Canada is lagging behind both places where repository use is more strongly enforced, and places where publishers are largely OA.

For the Canadian perspective: From Sugimoto and Lariviere, we know that the rates of Tri-Agency results being Open Access are abysmally low in Canada. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07101-w

https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10743

6 of 36

OA MEASURMENT ASSUMPTIONS

Practicality/ neutrality of data
Knowledge is good and our main problem is access
Neutrality of the result - full OA is good, no matter how we get there
Primacy placed on country/ institution as independent pieces - which is very deeply part of a system of prestige

6

This goal can obviously be critiqued for not having been met, but there are underlying assumptions behind some of these critiques in and of themselves. Like many measurements, it is easy to fall into a trap of thinking that the measuring itself is neutral, and practical even.

There are innumerable critiques of measurement and neutrality, and if you haven’t already read it, the Whiteness of Practicality by David James Hudson https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/handle/10214/11619 talks about the ways that “practicality” is a hegemonic value in librarianship, and obscures the historical specificity of the way the focus on practicality is shaped by white supremacy - rendering the violence it rests on invisible.

Measuring the “gains” of OA in this way, as brought to us by the latest transformative agreement with a particular publisher, makes it easier to avoid talking about the various ideological conflicts and contradictions, the “polarisation” and politics in publishing - by choosing to stick to the language of the ideology that is the best at obscuring itself, neoliberalism.

(Neoliberalism is so omnipresent as a bogey-man that many have argued it no longer holds power as an analytic category, but I think particularly when we are talking about measurement and efficiency, it works as a descriptor)

Often even the critiques of a given “T”A replicates this false sense of individuality, when the critiques are narrow and focus “merely” on evaluating if “we” - the institution or the country - are at 100% OA. This high level measurement - the kind that admin and funders tell us they are interested in - obscures much more than it reveals.

Selected Tools and Services for Analyzing and Managing Open Access Journal Transformative Agreements: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01930826.2020.1727280?journalCode=wjla20

7 of 36

COSTS ARE CONTAINED - EFFICIENCY

7

The question of costs may seem purely economic - and it is not an easy question, even in economics - but it also has normative, political, and social assumptions. The efficient use of public funds, as mentioned, is often used as a ‘practical’ way to bridge “our” interests with those of admin and government - who do far more than *talk* about efficiency, austerity, and other values of neoliberalism - they put it into material practices.

I break this down into two main criticisms, both based on different understandings of “the market”. The first is that in order to drive down prices, we have to negotiate harder. This is a “consumer side” understanding of the market, though it also very much has implications for smaller publishers.

The second position is that to drive down prices, we have to not actually just be willing to walk away, we actually have to do so, in order to stop investing increasing amounts into the “new big deals”. This can be further split into a position that still holds out hope for the forces of a capitalist market, and a position that sees market concentration as a feature, not a bug, of our particular form of capitalism.

8 of 36

NEGOTIATION CRITIQUES

Need to Negotiate Better/ Harder (more prescriptive/ anticipatory)
Be Willing to Walk Away
Need Better Data

8

Fees are not transparent/ proportionate to work done

SSo the first perspective (exemplified by a lot of the UC rhetoric):
We need to negotiate better or harder, we need better data (actual knowledge about our APC spend, for example) and even “we need to be willing to walk away”, but as a negotiation strategy.
This school of thought strengthens the case for consortia/ larger ‘blocs’ who may have better negotiating power
But what of recent analyses, such as that of the Dutch agreement, that shows that even when we think we’ve “won”, we may actually have lost, in terms of having signed over researcher data that is much more valuable? See The datafication in transformative agreements for open access publishing by Sam Moore: https://www.samuelmoore.org/2020/07/03/the-datafication-in-transformative-agreements-for-open-access-publishing/
Underlying all of this is the belief that we, as a consumer or market, should have more leverage. This may be an overly utopian view of how markets function.
UofC have negotiated in clauses that look at profit margins: https://zenodo.org/record/3827574#.YoUkfVTMI2w
the 2019 SPARC landscape report – looking at just how deeply these former publishers have now become “data analytics” companies, is a must read https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis

9 of 36

NEGOTIATION ASSUMPTIONS

Cancelling deals is (only) necessary as a bargaining tactic
We have enough resources to match their data/ analytics
There is some way we can win

Market is “competitive”
Competition is what drives technological innovation
Knowledge we need is market knowledge

(Large) publishers are ultimately rational and need customers to purchase “T”As
As long as the customer is large enough they can exert market pressure in their own favour through threatened or actual imposition of economic costs

9

Almost all Negotiation critiques also couch themselves as pragmatic - “we know it isn’t good in the long run, but it is what researchers want, so we are just doing it for now” or “everybody else is doing it, so we have to, so we might as well try to do it better”

I don’t want to knock the time and effort that goes into negotiating these on the consortial end. It is… a ton, because unlike giant publishing companies, the main *focus* of our work isn’t focused on data trying to extract (or defend) every last drop of profit.

The assumptions behind “negotiate better” often buy into a particular view of the market - one that is ultimately still competitive, where consumers can exercise choice, and where competition is what drives innovation.

Applying “market pressure” to lower prices – one of the early claims for what transformative agreements could do - seems to have failed, especially when we see the latest TA for Nature journals with APCs of over $14,000.

Indeed, in oligopolistic markets – those with high market concentration – there is a much greater ability of those few companies to set their own prices, and not to have to respond to things like “consumer demand”. https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/10-2-oligopoly/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212567113000336

Why Publication Services Must Not be Negotiated - Bjorn Brembs - http://bjoern.brembs.net/2022/03/why-publication-services-must-not-be-negotiated/

10 of 36

10

Big Deal for APCs Instead of Subscriptions (Meg Wacha)
Can’t Unbundle - sets researcher expectations

NEW BIG DEAL CRITIQUES

Convoluted models and costs (espec. w/ offsetting)
Can Have Hidden Admin Burden (eg, JISC/Wiley – Kevin Sanders)

Continues to commit majority of budget to large publishers
Puts publishing costs in Library budgets
Costs are not contained

The other type of argument that comes up around the “containment” of costs and unifying of publication & reading is that this is “A new Big Deal for APCs”. Bundling journal costs together ostensibly results in savings for libraries, but also brings with it difficulties with controlling cost increases, being locked in to large expenditures, paying for content we don’t necessarily want.

There are many who criticize that nothing about Transformative Agreements changes these conditions, but by adding publishing to the ‘deal’, makes the lock-in worse..

Are TAs much different than BDs? Both take up major parts of the budget
TAs can’t be unbundled, and may offer even less budget autonomy for smaller institutions or those facing severe cuts
Some of the deals being negotiated actually don’t differ in price – “cost neutral” often includes inflationary increases, which many library budgets simply aren’t going to be seeing
In Canada in particular, Library budgets and personnel haven’t had a great deal of responsibility for faculty publishing, so the Admin burden on us may actually increase. Even in the UK, where there is already a much higher degree of Library involvement because of things like UKRI, the recent “pause” on the JISC/Wiley deal should ring warning bells, because the labour of sorting out which publications do/ don’t count for the deal is entirely falling to library workers

https://poynder.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-open-access-big-deal-back-to-future.html

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07317131.2020.1728136?journalCode=wtsq20

https://deltathink.com/news-views-the-impact-of-transformative-agreements-on-the-value-of-the-big-deal-part-1-methodology/

11 of 36

11

Ongoing struggle over finite resources (budgets & beyond)
Library workers are not the only ones who decide library budgets

People don’t necessarily value what they don’t see
Different institutions have different needs, no one “efficient” solution

There is a power imbalance between large publishers and the library
There is a power imbalance between instructional/ research faculty and the library

NEW BIG DEAL ASSUMPTIONS

We start to see some different assumptions underlying this direction of critique. Many are still pragmatic - that this is bad because we are increasing library budgets by adding publication to them, in a way that may set up future expectations with researchers, while continuing to obscure from them the costs. But these critiques also acknowledge that there is conflict here, as we struggle over finite resources. Additionally, while not often explicitly said, concerns about library expectations reflect internal power differentials between librarian and instructional/ research faculty. There is also more skepticism here that negotiation will work, especially with a recognition that there is a power imbalance between the Big Five and even the biggest library consortia.

Surveillance Publishing: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/1874/

12 of 36

MONEY IS SHIFTED TO OA - MORAL & ECONOMIC

12

13 of 36

13

Does not shift power from oligopolies
Based on existing profit extraction
Increases market share / prestige of particular publishers

MARKET CONCENTRATION CRITIQUES

Further redistribution of public money to private entities
Pushes out Diamond publishers

Funders don’t fund publishing enough, changes in models are easier at larger scales
Small Societies/ niche publishers are limited in negotiating ability

There are a LOT of critiques of “T”As that centre around the market concentration we see in scholarly publishing. In short, these critiques generally argue that:

TAs do no shift power from oligopolies – because they are

Based on existing profit extraction, it helps to

Increase market share / prestige of particular publishers, which results in

Further redistribution of public money to private entities, and the big get bigger.

This market concentration pushes out Diamond publishers, and disadvantages smaller publishers, who cannot gather data and negotiating information as readily as larger scale publishers

Questions of free labour, prestige, shareholder profit extraction, speculative finance (what Cameron Neylon refers to as “money leaving the system”) and what all of this means for scholarship is almost never broken down when we are “merely” discussing taking what is currently paid out, and trying to apply it to something else, but gets woven into many of these critiques.
Common question : Is it *fair* (and/ or “efficient”) that these costs, even if kept neutral, protect a sometimes 40% profit margin?
TAs may in fact exacerbate the price inflation we have seen in the past, by making “deals” with publishers that have the effect of changing publication habits. While there have been lots of studies showing that researchers aren’t price sensitive when it comes to *reading*, many of them are when it comes to *publishing* (particularly non-grant holders, or people from Winnipeg!).
Think of this as the “brand name” issue – prestige brands, like prestige journals, can charge a higher price precisely because there IS someone – not everyone, not by a long shot – willing to pay that price.
Dave Ghamandi reminds us that TAs are *part* of the system of prestige, which is why they are so expensive. The “biggest schools are in a mutually beneficial relationship with the biggest publishers” (https://twitter.com/saggiotipo/status/1317197584692281344 ) and pay-to-publish actually fits this system of prestige and reward – and its barriers to entry - quite well
TAs also have significant barriers for entry for smaller publishers, widening the divide in “market” share

¼ of Austria’s funding for research goes into publication (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253226)

“Academic publishers sell a highly profitable, yet immensely publicly subsidized product”. (ibid) - not actually that unusual to find large amounts of public money behind any “private” success

As a side note, doing political economy of any type sometimes ends up sounding like a detailed conspiracy theory, because of how entangled things like private equity firms and investors ARE with each other.
One of the backers of Springer’s (yet again failed) IPO (initial public offering) is “BC Partners”, a private equity/ buyout firm. Even *Bloomberg* agrees there are potentially many negatives to the rise of private equity firms – they essentially burden companies with debt, force them into restructuring for efficiency, and squeeze out every bit of return possible. These are not the people we want operating our scholarly communications system, yet we keep giving them more money. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-03/how-private-equity-works-and-took-over-everything
Toolkit for publishers: https://www.alpsp.org/OA-agreements

14 of 36

14

MARKET CONCENTRATION ASSUMPTIONS 1 - MARKETS ARE FINE

Commodity markets are fine, it is just too much market concentration that is bad
Can regulate market concentration with anti-trust measures (the market cannot be “free”)
Consumers can affect market concentration by relocating their resources, forcing transparency
Non-profits are outside the corporate system

There are two different sets of assumptions that seem to operate here. The first is still pro-market, just not the capitalist market as it currently looks. These critiques call for interventions like anti-trust (which for the record, I am not against!) and other regulatory efforts on the market, or again, consumer-side action like boycotts, shareholder activism, etc.

Some of these critiques focus on the non-profit nature of a publisher. While this is aimed at deflating some of that profit to shareholders at the expense of the public purse, it can also ascribe overly value-based purpose to non-profits, many of which are either shells for vanity philanthro-capitalism (https://ssir.org/point_counterpoint/philanthrocapitalism ),

See: Putting the “Social” back in social enterprise - https://nonprofitquarterly.org/putting-the-social-back-in-social-enterprise-an-evidence-based-approach/

15 of 36

15

Financialization and speculation do not inherently improve production, but do increase exploitation
Corporations will choose model that leads to greatest profits - APCs
Non-profits are part of this system (Noûs)
Alternative economic systems

Accumulation, concentration, and centralization are natural tendencies of capitalist markets
Corporations are capable of complex collective action
Monopoly Finance Capital requires new areas to put surplus investment in - acquisition & imperialism

MARKET CONCENTRATION ASSUMPTIONS 2 - MARKETS TEND TOWARDS CONCENTRATION

The second set of assumptions is more critical of capitalist markets, the process of commodification, and the accumulation (& speculation with financialisation) that accompanies them.

In this view (& the economic evidence that appears to very fully back it), capitalist markets tend toward concentration, through different levers, but most obviously through successful corporations gaining enough capital to buy out competitors. It is important to note that while we might think of the phrase “collective action” in a libratory sense, it also describes the often very sophisticated collective action that corporations and those with capital take in their own class interests.

So this perspective assumes that Accumulation, concentration, and centralization are natural tendencies of capitalist markets, and that
Monopoly Finance Capital requires new areas to put surplus investment in to continue to grow (including our pensions) - this leads to acquisition & imperialism to find new markets and labour to exploit.
Markets over time are dominated by profit-maximizing oligopolies
Financialization and speculation do not inherently improve production (and we can see this in the disastrous effect hedge fund purchases often have on companies), but do increase exploitation
Corporations will choose model that leads to greatest profits - APCs
Non-profits are part of this system (Nous, Camille. 2021. “Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions”. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7 (December):1-27. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36448 ).

John Bellamy Foster, in his 40 year review of Monopoly Capital at https://monthlyreview.org/2006/12/01/monopoly-finance-capital/ : ”A system geared to speculation under conditions of increasing financial fragility needs constant new infusions of cash, much of which is obtained from the working population through drastic increases in exploitation. For most U.S. workers the economic contradictions of monopoly-finance capital have created a situation something like the closing of a vise-grip. Real wages for most workers have been stagnant for a generation or more; household debt is rising as a proportion of disposable income; unemployment/underemployment has climbed; labor force participation is falling (reflecting weak job creation and the discouragement this engenders); heath care benefits, pensions, and governmental services to the population (including education) are all in decline; and the share of taxes paid by workers is expanding. It would seem from all of this that under monopoly-finance capital “an accumulation of misery” is “a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth.””

Further reading: https://monthlyreview.org/2011/04/01/monopoly-and-competition-in-twenty-first-century-capitalism/

16 of 36

SCHOLARSHIP�CRITIQUES

16

Shareholder, rather than scholar, governed
TAs focus on “business models” instead of scholarship
Leads to an erosion of varied publishing methods/ experimentation
Leads to ‘promotion’ of publishers with “T”A’s

Scholarship critiques are often complementary to those more critical of market approaches. These critiques note that the incentives for shareholders might distort the scholarly goals of journals, and that by increasing the profits, “T”As increase the distorted incentives. This happens on both a macro level, as models of publishing consolidate around the “winner” (the APC model), and on the individual level, as “T”As are celebrated & promoted by Librarians and consortia, and influence the publishing choices of price motivated researchers.
There are many examples of how a market focus actually ruins science and scholarship, by perverting the incentives for both authors and publishers https://leonidtiokhin.medium.com/is-scientific-reform-heading-in-the-right-direction-a-call-for-contributions-99110f2572f0
“Delta Think’s OA Market Sizing (i.e., revenue generated by providers or, conversely, costs incurred to buyers of content) shows that the open access market continues to grow faster than the underlying journals publishing market. Based on current trends, we estimate it to have been worth around $763m in 2019 and on track to grow to around $850m in 2020.” - https://deltathink.com/news-views-open-access-market-sizing-update-2020/

17 of 36

SCHOLARSHIP�ASSUMPTIONS

17

The process of commodification and marketization is at odds with aspects of scholarly publishing integrity
Whoever pays for something likely influences it in some way, unless attention is paid at the governance level
In some (possibly many) circumstances profit will be at odds with scholarly values & ethics
Collaboration, transparency, & experimentation are valued by the scholarly endeavour, as well as “scientific progress”

While everyone has different assumptions about what scholarly values *are*, and they are certainly subject to deserved critique themselves, rarely does anyone make the argument that commercial interest improve the scholarly pursuit. Some of the assumptions here may be:

Whoever pays for something likely influences it in some way, unless attention is paid at the governance level
In some (possibly many) circumstances profit will be at odds with scholarly values & ethics

LP Certification Values Aligned Rubric: https://osf.io/b5vxe/

KU Fair Open Access Fund: https://www.kuleuven.be/open-science/what-is-open-science/scholarly-publishing-and-open-access/schol-pub/fair-oa

https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/new-copim-report-on-community-governance-of-open-infrastructures/release/1

https://scholarled.org/constitution.html

https://www.crossref.org/blog/a-registry-of-editorial-boards-a-new-trust-signal-for-scholarly-communications/

18 of 36

“FULL” TRANSITION TO OA - STRUCTURAL

18

19 of 36

19

Where is the “Transformation”?
Leads to APC hyperinflation

“TRANSFORMED” OA

CRITIQUE

Cements Hybrid Journals/ APC model
Few Journals flipping – more hybrid journals proliferating

Indeed, very few journals have actually flipped to OA as a result of Transformative Agreements – in three years of Springer UK agreement, only two journals “flipped” – and many more hybrid journals pop up every day

This is something that ESAC recognizes is a major issue, with many members stating they do not want to fund hybrid journals, but does not seem to have been resolved

Inequities of Article Processing Charges: How the Oligopoly of Academic Publishers Profits from Open Access https://zenodo.org/record/6557271#.YoUZH1TMI2x

Evaluating UK offset agreements (2015–17) - Stuart Lawson - https://www.napier.ac.uk/~/media/worktribe/output-1911989/evaluating-uk-offset-agreements-(201517).pdf

Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis - Shaun Yon-Seng Khoo - https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10729

Will there be any transformation or are we stuck with the transformative agreements? https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-503/will-there-be-any-transformation-or-are-we-stuck-transformative

20 of 36

20

Shifts inequity to authors - becomes “pay to publish” rather than “pay to read”
APC model assumes a particular model of ‘scholar’
Makes OA the prestige option / incentives exclusion

EQUITY AND DIVERSITY

CRITIQUES

Only an option for richer institutions/ countries
Keeps the global system unequal

But perhaps the biggest concern with “T”As is that instead of the systemic change they promise, they grow a model that adds prestige for a few, and is unattainable to most, which doesn’t sound very different from what we have..

Shifts inequity to authors - becomes “pay to publish” rather than “pay to read”, and this is unequally distributed based on gender, class, age, race, career stage, and discipline
Makes OA the prestige option / incentives exclusion
Keeps the global system unequal

Transformative Open Access Agreements: a Response to Scholarly Publishing - Steenkamp, Vanessa; Mashamba‑Thompson, Tivani Phosa; Rouhi, Sara

: https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/81963

Read-and-Publish Open Access deals are heightening global inequalities in access to publication. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/02/21/read-and-publish-open-access-deals-are-heightening-global-inequalities-in-access-to-publication/

Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/36448

CRKN Tweet: https://twitter.com/CRKN_RCDR/status/1321151731615649792

Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access?: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1347#leap1347-bib-0046

21 of 36

21

Many models for why inequity persists - sociological (“functionalist” or “conflict”), historical, psychological

EQUITY AND DIVERSITY

ASSUMPTIONS

Structural inequality for the majority world is necessary for accumulation of wealth for the minority world
This also applies to Universities themselves, which function because of inequity, and our roles as “intelligista”/ the PMC (Dave Ghamandi)

Many models for why inequity persists - sociological (“functionalist” or “conflict”, like you may have learned in first year), historical, psychological.

I admittedly come from a Marxian economics background, and think there is persuasive evidence that it is baked into capitalist markets - and maintained by social forces of privilege and power. As profits tend to decline over time, structural inequality for the majority world is necessary for the unfettered accumulation of wealth for the minority world. This takes the form of not just imperialism, but also domestic racial capitalism. Universities themselves function because of inequity of opportunity and prestige, and academics’ roles as the intelligista is often to make this inequity palatable - not always in their own interests.

22 of 36

THANKS!

22

There are many more critiques that don’t fall within this neat (messy) schema. Specifically conversations about labour, its conditions, and its role in production & reproduction. (for fun, check out https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/labor-of-open)

My biggest reason for attempting this exercise, particularly in how it relates to CRKN & the belated conversations we are having in Canada, is that these critiques exist already, very robustly, and we could be focusing our energy and resources on something other than TAs. Wwe are missing out on important conversations and initiatives that *could* change things - like national legislation for the rights retention like the Taverne Amendment, scholar-led publishing, subscribe to open and other ways to support born-OA publishing, strengthening the existing Canadian platforms we have like PKP & Coalition Publica, and increasing support for parallel, nationalized or international University-led publishing alternatives.

What would it look like if all of our collective effort and cost on negotiating transformative agreements instead went into supporting Erudit? Identifying Canadian journals that have sold themselves to Wiley for sustainability? Increasing University capacity to host these scholar-led endeavours? Giving the weight and prestige to Erudit instead?

There are lots of different communities growing (many, of course, supported by non-profits/ philanthropy) - this is absolutely not a comprehensive list, or even a list of endorsements, but things I wish we were hearing more about at the CRKN/ consortial level:

Coalition Publica - https://www.coalition-publi.ca

SciELO https://scielo.org/

Redalyc - https://www.redalyc.org/

AmeliCA - http://amelica.org/index.php/en/about/

African Journals Online : https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol

ScholarLed - https://scholarled.org/

Radical OA - http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/

COPIM - https://www.copim.ac.uk/

Action Plan for Diamond OA - https://zenodo.org/record/6282403#.YoUXuFTMI2y

Open Book Publishers - https://www.openbookpublishers.com/

Libraria.cc - https://libraria.cc/

Invest in Open Infrastructure: https://investinopen.org/

Catalog of Open Infrastructures: https://investinopen.org/research/catalog/

Lyrasis - https://www.lyrasis.org/Pages/Main.aspx

COAR - https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/coar-welcomes-significant-funding-for-the-notify-project/

23 of 36

23

24 of 36

BONUS SLIDES

24

25 of 36

CRITIQUES OF TRANSFORMATIVE AGREEMENTS

25

Fees are not transparent/ proportionate to work done

Convoluted models & management (especially w/ “pretansformative”)

Where is the “Transformation”?

Too expensive to do for smaller publishers

Further locks in prestige for those who can pay

May promote publishers w/ TAs over those without

Encourages further market consolidation and increases dependency

Contributes to APC hyperinflation

Publishing governed by shareholders, not scholars

Pushes out diamond OA publishers

Big Deal for APCs - Can't unbundle

COSTS

ALIGNMENT W/ SCHOLARLY VALUES

IMPACT ON OA OUTPUT

ECONOMIC MODELS

PAY TO PUBLISH

Further redistribution of public money to private entities

Does not address exploitative labour

Makes OA the prestige option / incentives exclusion

Locks in increasing profit margins

Invests in unethical data companies

Encourages and increases hybrid journals

Global rise in OA has been Green or Diamond

Even Sweden is out

Adds publishing costs to Library budgets

Can't afford for every publisher

Sets researcher expectations

Shifts inequity to authors

Only an option for richer institutions/ countries

Leads to an erosion of varied publishing methods

Funders don’t fund enough, costs fall to publishers

Will not ever get us to 100%

26 of 36

THE ABC’S OF “TRANSFORMATIVE” CRITIQUES

Brianne Selman @ LPF 2022

27 of 36

THE LETTER C

27

28 of 36

28

“C is for Cereal, Sesame Street Cereal” is CC-BY-NC Rusty Blazenhoff

29 of 36

29

COMPETITION & CHOICE

Arguments

Assumptions

Convoluted models & management (especially w/ “pretansformative”)
May promote publishers w/ TAs over those without
Pushes out diamond OA publishers
Leads to an erosion of varied publishing methods

Free market mythology

30 of 36

30

CONFLICT

Arguments

Assumptions

Ongoing struggle over finite resources/ budgets
Funders don’t fund enough, costs fall to publishers
Can't afford for every publisher
Conflicts of interest - between shareholders with a profit imperative, and scholars with a ‘truth’ or ‘values imperative
Conflicts of ideology - accumulation & exploitation vs collectivity

Social inequality is a result of intentional inequitable distribution of resources

31 of 36

31

COERCION, CONSENT, AND POWER

Arguments

Assumptions

Sets researcher expectations
Adds publishing costs to Library budgets
Shifts inequity to authors
There is no “winning” negotiations because of power imbalances
ResearchFish

Coercion is the ability to make someone do what they do not want to do
Universities, as institutions, have different interests than (most of) the people who comprise them
Institutions have power differentials within them and across them
Corporations can have more power than most institutions

32 of 36

32

COLLECTIVE ACTION

Arguments

Assumptions

Where is the “Transformation”?
Further redistribution of public money to private entities
Shareholder activism & Subscribe2Open

Corporations are very good at complex collective action
It is difficult to organize collective action of workers as it is actively opposed by ruling classes
Many within academics are “intelligista” who work in the interests of the ruling classes, rather than seeing their allegiance to the workers

33 of 36

33

CULTURAL CAPITAL

Arguments

Assumptions

Journals as “club goods”
Culture of evaluation benefits institutions with power
Sets researcher expectations
Further locks in prestige for those who can pay
Makes OA the prestige option / incentives exclusion
Structural inequality is necessary for accumulation in minority world

Concept can be used at institutional level rather than just individual (moving beyond Bourdieu)
The “intelligista” typically create/ moderate culture in favour of capital

34 of 36

34

CONTRADICTIONS

Arguments

Assumptions

Fees are not transparent/ proportionate to work done
Does not address exploitative labour - exploitation of workers by the class with investment ability
Invests in unethical data companies
Profitability is set against rights of workers
Short term gains (and expansion) may lead to long term pains in system
Prestige requires a flipside

Class war

35 of 36

35

CONCENTRATION

Arguments

Assumptions

Encourages further market consolidation and increases dependency
Encourages and increases hybrid journals
Big Deal for APCs - Can't unbundle
Too expensive to do for smaller publishers
Locks in increasing profit margins

36 of 36

36

COLONIZATION

Arguments

Assumptions

Global rise in OA has been Green or Diamond
Makes OA the prestige option / incentives exclusion
Only an option for richer institutions/ countries

Accumulation requires new markets, all capitalism is racial capitalism