Joe Deville, Mattering Press / Lancaster University / Open Book Collective
Talk given on 17th September 2024 at the OASPA 2024 Conference, Lisbon, as part of a panel on ‘Open Access and Precarity in the Academic Landscape: Learning from the Experiences of Authors and Scholar-led Publishers’. The panel also included presentations from Dr Judith Fathallah (Lancaster University) and Dr Nonhlanhla Dube (Lancaster University), and was chaired by Dr Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London / Open Library of Humanities).
Today, I’m presenting on behalf of Mattering Press, a small Diamond Open Access Publisher.
I and my colleagues launched Mattering Press a little over 10 years ago. We publish books in and around the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). For those of you that don’t know what STS is, one way to think of it is as a subfield of sociology, which has a particular interest in thinking critically about the way in which expert knowledge circulates. This includes looking at the social and material infrastructures that underpin and shape how that knowledge circulates. Hopefully you can see how this connects to my and my colleagues’ interest in open infrastructures and the potentials of open access.
We may be a small publisher, but we have, I am pleased to say, managed to accrue some of the indicators of prestige that are often assumed to be the kind of things large, commercial publishers have a monopoly on. This includes one of our books – Democratic Situations – winning a major prize earlier this year, at one of the largest gatherings in our field, the EASST-4S conference in Amsterdam, as well as publishing some books by some of the most widely recognised names in our field. So, by some measures, Mattering Press has been a success. However, from the beginning, operating beneath this gloss, has been precarity. And I am here talking about precarity in two dimensions: precarity experienced by some members of our largely volunteer team and the wider precarity of the press.
My colleague Julien McHardy wrote about this some years ago now, in an article that I returned to while thinking about this panel.[i] Yesterday, we heard Catherine Mitchell rightly warning us about the dangers of Diamond Open Access initiatives relying on labours of love to sustain their work.[ii] But this is exactly what Julien identified our model as, back in 2017: ‘love is our business model: Precarious, productive, scary, unpredictable, high stakes’.
There was a little more to our business model. From a very early stage, we decided that we were only going to be able to commit to the press if we were able to find the resources to pay other, skilled professionals to take on at least some of the press’ production work, including typesetting, copy editing, and proof reading. We managed to do this by charging optional Book Processing Charges (BPCs) to research projects and institutions. We set a fee of £6,000 which we also stated we could potentially discount, sometimes by up to 100%. Now you will recall that yesterday, I argued that BPCs are fundamentally inequitable.[iii] And they are – even if our rates are almost half those charged by some commercial publishers. But at this stage of our work, it was the only game in town for us.
Anyway, BPCs did not solve our precarity, either as individual editors or as a press. While some of the editors at Mattering Press have in effect tenured jobs, some do not. Two editors are currently not in institutionalized academia, even as they continue to work on the press. Another two have precarious employment contracts. Any revenues we were able to generate were nowhere large enough or reliable enough to be able to pay salaried positions at the press. So, the press remained, and to some extent still remains, multiply precarious.
However, in the same article, Julien in also observes that this what he refers to as ‘precarization’ also needs to be understood in relation to a desire that we all felt to create a space for knowledge production outside the conventional logics of accountability that exist in so many university contexts. ‘Precarization’, he writes, ‘arguably is the price we pay at Mattering Press to partially escape accountability’. Precarity in Diamond open access publishing is, then, partially also produced by a higher education system that has a counterintuitive tendency to sometimes constrain what is thinkable and, when it comes to publishing, what is practically doable.
In preparing for this talk, I thought it might be interesting to look at how other scholar-led publishers accounted for such questions in relation to their own work. This took me to an open data repository: the Jisc repository, which contains a series of transcripts of interviews with scholar-led publishers and (then) new university presses conducted in 2017 by Janneke Adema. [iv] This interviews forms part of Janneke and Graham Stone’s landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishers.[v]
One interview is with Eileen Joy, the Director of punctum books. Eileen notes how one of the things that punctum was doing then, and still does I believe, is publish ‘things that are para academic’. As she goes on to make clear, one of the things punctum does is provide opportunities both for conversations that don’t fit the conventional logics of the academy and for people who can’t find their place within, who are excluded from, who are rendered precarious by, the academy, even as they want to continue to be part of its work.
But more than that, Eileen notes the surprise she experienced in the early days of the press by the degree of support, both practical and intellectual, punctum was granted by colleagues and collaborators in the para-academy. Scholar-led open access publishing therefore exists in a potentially complicated relationship with the logics of exclusion that higher education tends to produce.
But as we heard yesterday from Reggie Raju from University of Cape Town Libraries on the work of setting up the African Platform for Open Scholarship, these logics of exclusion are not just local but also global.[vi] As Reggie made clear, we can see how the open access movement has, in key respects, betrayed many parts of the world.[vii] In this sense, precarity in publishing is produced not just through the kinds of employment conditions experienced by individual academics, nor just through the business models of individual publishers, but also via global dynamics of marginalisation.
There is a commonality, though, in the motivations that led to the establishment of the African Platform for Open Scholarship and those behind setting up presses like Mattering Press and punctum. And that is a conviction that despite the precarity, despite the marginalisation, there is value in nonetheless in picking up our increasingly digital tools and building something. As Reggie writes, the platform was created in part ‘to demonstrate how structures that perpetuate inequality and exclusionary practices can be dismantled’ [emphasis added]. The platform, like Mattering, like punctum, is important not just because of the content it hosts, but also because of how it remakes academic publishing.
Over the years, publishers like punctum, alongside publishers like Open Book Publishers, and alongside trailblazing models such as Open Library of Humanities and recent models like Opening the Future and MIT Press’ Direct to Open, have also shown that there are ways to remake the financing of Open Access publishing. This model involves securing non-BPC based open access funding via renewable memberships from potentially dozens of universities. And this so-called Diamond open access funding model has, for some of the smaller, scholar-led initiatives succeeded in addressing some of the logics of precarity that they were experiencing.
However, for a tiny press like Mattering Press, these models always seemed out of reach. We have always been over capacity – there was no way that we could create the comprehensive outreach programme required to run a collective library funding programme. There was no way we could manage the administrative work required to run a collective library funding programme. And more than that: there was no way that most libraries would concern themselves with directly supporting a publisher as small as ours: the work required to put us into the procurement system, to manage the subscription, would likely cost more than the amount they would be transferring to us.
That was until the creation of the Open Book Collective (OBC). And here, a declaration of interest: I am also the Managing Director of the OBC. But what the OBC does is take on that work of running collective library funding programmes, or what OBC calls a Supporter Programme. So now, Mattering Press has a Supporter Programme on offer via the OBC’s ScholarLed package, as well as being part of the OBC’s overall Open Book Collective package. In a little over a year, the OBC has generated, on our behalf, support from around 40 libraries across the world (for which we are hugely grateful!). This is because our offer is bundled together with Supporter Programmes from other publishers and publishing service providers, many of which are small, like us. A programme that, on its own, would likely be insignificant for a library suddenly becomes something that they could consider supporting. This is what my colleagues have called ‘scaling small’, being put to work.[viii]
And while we are in the early stages, this new revenue has been transformative. A direct result is that now, alongside our seven editorial board members, Mattering Press now has an employee, for the very first time. The wonderful Jennifer Horsley, who has joined us as our Publishing Project Manager. Having Jennifer work with us to support our work, to hold the press together, has already been a revelation. The press feels more secure and sustainable than at any point in its history.
We are certainly not out of the woods when it comes to precarization in Diamond Open Access. Subscription revenues via the Open Book Collective are still a long way from the level we need to fully sustain the press. This will require more libraries to support the work that we and the Open Book Collective are doing. But we have made a start. We have begun to build, begun to demonstrate, some of the ways in which we can continue to collectively do open access differently.
[i] McHardy, J. (2017) ‘Like cream: Valuing the invaluable’, Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 3. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2017.116.
[ii] Mitchell, C. (2024) ‘The library as a sustainable (and equitable) diamond open access publisher’. Conference presentation at OASPA 2024 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
[iii] Deville, J. (2024) ‘Can scaling small scale? Lessons learned from building community-led infrastructures for open access book publishing’. Conference presentation at OASPA 2024 Conference. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13694568.
[iv] Adema, J. (2017) Interview transcriptions: Changing Publishing Ecologies. A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-led Publishing. Jisc. Available at: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6652.
[v] Adema, J. and Stone, G. (2017) Changing publishing ecologies: A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing. Bristol: JISC. Available at https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6666/1/Changing-publishing-ecologies-report.pdf.
[vi] Raju, R. (2024) ‘One finger cannot pick up a grain: Communityism foundationalising diamond open access’. Conference presentation at OASPA 2024 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
[vii] Raju, R. and Claassen, J. (2022) ‘Open access: From hope to betrayal’, College and Research Libraries News, 83(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.83.4.161.
[viii] Barnes, L. and Gatti, R. (2019) ‘The ScholarLed Consortium: OA Monograph Publishing and “Scaling Small”’. Conference presentation at The 14th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7557/5.4914. Adema, J. and Moore, S.A. (2021) ‘Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 16(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918.