A Dialogue: Commercial and Anti-commercial Thinking in Diamond Open Access Publishing

Abstract

Michigan Publishing and The Open Library of Humanities are both diamond open access publishers who have pioneered university-led, non-commercial business models. Both organizations work with library partners worldwide to fund the cost of publishing articles and books in the humanities and social sciences, which are free for authors to publish and readers to access. This places equity at the heart of scholarly publishing and exists to offer a compelling alternative for those that want to return scholarship to community ownership. Our presentation explores the parallel ways in which our ventures have established non-commercial thinking at the heart of our organizational history, identity and value proposition as publishers.

However, wary of how the language around diamond open access can become dogmatic, this presentation seeks to challenge and shake up our identification with anti-commercialism by exploring and testing the different ways in which our not-for-profit organizations have, in practice and by necessity, nonetheless engaged in commercial thinking – specifically regarding the development of our technological platforms, Fulcrum and Janeway. This presentation therefore seeks to establish and perform a dialogue (taking inspiration from Dialogues, a 1977 book by Gilles Deleuze and his student Claire Parnet) around the balance between pragmatism and idealism, and to interrogate whether the way we speak about these two around Open Access is useful. We argue that creating flexibility in our thinking on this topic (avoiding the idea that business is always and inevitably a “dirty word”) has and will continue to be crucial for our sustainability as university-led publishers, if we are serious about providing a genuine alternative to the rampant commercial acquisition of grassroots community projects.