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Communitas and the commons: The open access movement and the dynamics of restructuration in scholarly publishing |
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| Authors: | KIRSTEN BELL |
| Institution: | Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Roehampton. Her current research interests lie in the anthropology of public health and the contemporary processes shaping academic knowledge production. She is a member of the executive committee of Libraria: a collective of journals and learned societies in anthropology and neighbouring fields that are exploring open access alternatives to the existing ecology of academic publishing. |
| Abstract: | In this article, the author reflects on the open access movement as a social and political phenomenon via the lens of Turner’s work on liminality and communitas. Moving beyond the neo-liberalization frame, which is the primary way that the transformations in open access have been conceptualized to date, she argues that they are better understood as a product of the hybridizing relationship between structure and anti-structure. This perspective allows us to make sense of the open access movement’s seemingly paradoxical qualities, which, the author suggests, point to cultural processes still very much in the subjunctive mood. |
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