Challenging Surveillance in the Library and the United States

            In the near two decades since the Real ID Act (2005) was passed by the U.S. Congress, countless youth have turned of age, received drivers’ licenses and/or state ID’s, and proceeded on with their lives. For a subsequent minority of the United States population, the process of applying for a drivers’ license was never easy.[1] Questions around gender identity, immigration status and permanent residency have disadvantaged already marginalized individuals, but come October 1^st of this year, the implementation of the Real ID Act will heighten national security measures that will undoubtedly result in whole swaths of the population being geographically and civically restricted.[2] At the crux of the Real ID implementation is the topic of  surveillance. In an age where computers, cell phones, and in-home devices are constantly listening and/or watching, it is no surprise that the United States federal government has chosen to enact a policy that will further capitalize on their prerogative to surveil Americans into submission.[3] Rather than being surprised, I recognize that surveillance is not uncommon in our interactions with the American public library system. Practicing a system of surveillance and implementing mechanisms to ensure practitioners and patrons are well behaved is a routine aspect of working in a library space. Thus, I make the claim that challenges to surveillance in the library serve as solutions to the practices the United States has enacted, and continues to enact, to reinforce conceptions of citizenship, conformity and homogeneity. 

            Breaking up my paper into two parts, one part being theoretical challenges to surveillance in the library and one part being material challenges to surveillance in the library, I propose that each set of challenges serve as a means for Library and Information Science students to think about the ways they can decolonize their own pedagogy within a library environment. Before discussing the solutions proposed to surveillance, I must address that those who are the most surveilled in society are people whose gender, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, age and class identities are at the margins. These are the folks who are most harmed by surveillance. 

            The theoretical solutions to surveillance in the library encompass ways of knowing and being that are fundamentally opposed to being in a space that is invested in the subjugation of library users. At the top of the list of solutions is the use of radical empathy in a library space to increase patron/practitioner engagement that produces an ongoing and long-lasting relationship and allows for patrons to do more than just ask reference questions.[4] As Michelle Caswell and  Marika Cifor state, their advocacy for radical empathy allows for a consciousness of care that demands an analysis of power within an information sharing relationship.[5] Pairing this approach with one of class consciousness, the importance of recognizing workplace decisions that are based around ones class, rather than who is capable and who is incapable, inevitably results in that consciousness being transferred onto patrons and colleagues.[6] In the past, these solutions have not necessarily been applied to challenging  surveillance, but serve as clear paths to how each of us can challenge a surveillance model at a time when almost every aspect of our lives is being scrutinized by someone or something. In a library setting, there is little room to come to these solutions on ones own, particularly when constantly under the close scrutiny and supervision that is allotted to everyone in the space. The challenge to surveillance is initiated though when we are able to stop self-surveilling and expand the bounds of how we are intended to act in a library space. 

            Equally important and applicable are the material solutions that LIS scholars and practitioners have offered to counteract surveillance in a library space. Analyzing the role metrics plays in tracking and counting the number of individuals who are using the library space at any given time, surveillance is inherently connected to the neoliberal approach. Libraries across the country have adopted the, “economization of social welfare” model that has been distributed as a means of keeping libraries open to the public at the expense of patron privacy and control over who should and should not be using the library.[7] The push for a more business oriented model towards public goods and services reinforces the belief that in order to access certain services one must provide sufficient evidence that one is eligible for those services. Much like Dean Spades argument, there is a framework within the United States that says in order to have ‘care taking” services a person needs to be open to some level of surveillance.[8] By naming the ways in which the library has taken on news ways to surveil the population they are intended to serve, library practitioners are conscious of and working towards a more critical way of undoing the harm that these neoliberal techniques have enacted. One concrete example of this is in Samantha Kelly Hastings work with a library population, in which she actively sought out support from the community and developed appropriate library content for the population she was serving.[9] Rather than fall prey to a need surveil, Hastings become engaged and invested in the community resulting in a return from the community that required no increased surveillance.[10]

            The surveillance that has always been in libraries, but in recent years has become heightened for a number of reasons is a threat to the libraries central purpose as a place of learning and knowledge production. When that purposes are subverted to be about profit and marginalization there is nothing to do but combat those norms and implement new ways of knowing and being. To except surveillance and feed into it is at the expense of a library system that is worth fighting for. 

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[1] Terry Nguyen, “Real IDs, explained,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/25/21147550/real-id-explained, last accessed March 10, 2020. 

[2] Dean Spade, “Administrating Gender,” Normal Life (New York: South End Press, 2011), as excerpted in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013), 324- 350.

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, “Part Three: Discipline,” 135-228.

[4] Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy

in the Archives,” Archivaria, 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43.

[5] Ibid, 30. 

[6] Christine Pawley, “Hegemony’s Handmaid? The Library and Information Studies Curriculum from a Class Perspective,” The Library Quarterly 68:2 (1998): 123-144.

[7] Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor, “Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies: An

Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2 (2019),

https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/122/50.

[8] Dean Spade, “Administrating Gender,” Normal Life (New York: South End Press, 2011), as excerpted in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013), 327.

[9] Samantha Kelly Hastings, “If Diversity is a Natural State, Why Don’t Our Libraries Mirror the Populations They Serve,” The Library Quarterly, Vol. 85, No.2, April 2015, pp. 133 – 138. 

[10] Ibid. 

(In)Visibility in the Children’s Section

(In)Visibility in the Children’s Section

Growing up, I loved the public library. My mom would take me on a semi regular routine and I would check out mounds of children’s books to take home. Getting to choose my own books to read felt as much of a treat as getting the newest toy from the newest Disney movie. I remember a handful of things from this experience: that my mom never read them to me, my step father couldn’t read them to me, and that I spent a childhood teaching myself to read using a tape player where I could listen to the audio version of the book or play back recordings to myself. I didn’t understand then that my mom was going to night classes to become a nurse to take care of her children after my dad died, or that my stepfather never got to learn to read and had spent his young adult years in prison. I felt joy at getting to go to the public library. I didn’t notice that my family didn’t look quite like the ones portrayed in the children’s books, or that my sexuality didn’t quite look like the ones portrayed in them either. I would check out about thirty books each month, go home, set up my dolls around me and jump into a book. I, unbeknownst to me in early childhood, was searching for myself in children’s books. It was clearly there in my Barbie doll selection as I always prefered Teresa (one of Barbie’s fictional friends) for having brown hair and being advertised as “Hispanic”, but it would be years before I started recognizing my search for self in books. 

Emily Drabinski opens their article, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction”, with the following statement, “Libraries are spaces where language really matters… Libraries are also spaces of control” (Drabiniski, 94). Drabinski then goes onto to describe the way in which the language is controlled, through classification structures, controlled vocabularies (which universalize language), and how, ultimately, these systems are “remarkably resistant to change'' (Drabinski, 94). Drabinski ties this back to the idea that libraries are constructed to hold this “disciplinary power of language” (Drabinski, 94). Training in conducting librarian reference is reinforced to work within this structure, as a site that doesn’t allow for any growth and change. I agree with the idea that libraries are a space where language matters, in various ways. I also understand that by applying queer theory to a problem that is deeply rooted in a language and system unwilling to change, pushing for this change I will be discussing shortly is a challenge. But the way I identify language matters the most for children.

Dean Spade talks about the ways in which administrative laws have further categorized lives into those who matter and those who don’t, those whose lives are “cultivated” and “those who are abandoned, imprisoned or extinguished” (Spade, 325). And while these laws have put into place to “protect” communities, they actually put those meant for protection into deeper levels of vulnerability. Recent policies and laws targeting LGBTQ+ communities have been growing on a national level. Laws recognizing marriage between gay and lesbian couples was followed by a surge in a continual struggle to pass laws recognizing transgender and non-binary identities. Pride month and national days of recognition in LGBTQ+ history have become a part of this new norm in public library spaces, and pop culture, without recognizing the historical suffering behind them. 

San Francisco Public Library, self promoting as the Queerest Library Ever, celebrates Pride month each year, hosting a wide range of events for adults, teens and children. Events for children in 2018 included Rainbow storytime and Drag Queen Story Time and two days of arts and crafts making posters and bracelets for the Pride parade. Similarly, the West Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library also hosts a Drag Queen Story Time. This particular event is well received and extremely popular, growing beyond Pride month and being held throughout the year. While the Los Angeles County Public Library does offer a page on its website dedicated to providing a reading list on the LGBTQ+ community, other resources are meant to be specifically sought out. 

The American Library Association has a subdivision dedicated entirely to meeting the needs of the LGBTQ+ community. The ALA associates the lack of awareness and public displays aimed for the LGBTQ+ community as due to the controversy that sexual orientation and gender identities can cause. Tying this back to the decision to make Drag Queen Story Time normalized to the point of making it a fun and more frequent event does meet backlash. Groups of folks will still call West Hollywood Public Library with concerns over their LGBTQ+ events, such as seeing it as harmful to the children. 

The ALA uses this as a potential reason as to why there may be a reluctance from purchasing more books or materials relating to LGBTQ+ communities. The ALA also gives an overall toolkit on how librarians should approach the public when it comes to meeting the needs and services for LGBTQ+ users. While this is aimed for library users in general, the ALA also offers resources, scholarships and awards. The Stonewall Book Awards, founded in 1971, are granted to authors who write LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. They also include a section dedicated to books, films, magazines and websites for children on LGBTQ+ genres. 

The LGBTQ+ community needs visibility, protection and understanding now more than ever. The constant struggle to push laws and policies into place that would protect the rights of these communities is something that needs to be instilled in our children on a fundamental level. By providing constant access to LGBTQ+ friendly events, services and books and other forms of media, the public library can play a huge role in making waves of change for good. LGBTQ+ children should have access to a librarian and children’s section where their identities are recognized in the books they read. While many of these books are already on the shelf, the fear of controversy is something that needs to be addressed and overcome. As a child, the public library was a place that I could go to escape and to try and find myself. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have grown up to seek out ways to help the library become a space for children, especially those who fall outside of the norm, to utilize for their own representation and sense of validation and security. 

Citations:

Dean Spade, “Administrating Gender,” Normal Life (New York: South End Press, 2011), as excerpted in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Los Angeles: Litwin, 2013), 324- 350. 

Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” Library Quarterly 83 (12) (2013): 94-111.

Race, Gender and Intersectionality: A Joyous Daybreak Will Surely Come | Jiarui Sun

Author’s note: The author of this blog post is an international student studying at UCLA with experience of living in the United States less than six months. Given the situation that I am not familiar with the American contexts sufficiently, this blog post can be just seen as very preliminary work.

Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal. Few may agree with me that our racial equality goals may never be realized.[1] - Derrick Bell

One day in October 2019, I received an e-mail from the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) list, which is intended for communications relating to AERI and to research and education relating to archives and archival studies more broadly. In this e-mail, an African American male who is a member of the AERI community described his experience of being subjected to racism when he worked as an archival professor in a university. After reading that, I felt shocked and appalled, because I didn’t expect such a bad thing can happen to an AERI member. But what is sadder is that even now, racial discrimination and gender discrimination may happen in every corner of the world, which we have to face and acknowledge.

In The Derrick Bell Reader, Derrick Bell, an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist writes, “Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal. Few may agree with me that our racial equality goals may never be realized.”[2]Although eliminating racial discrimination and gender discrimination can’t be easy, contrary to Bell, I argue that through the joint efforts of people from all walks of life, we have seen tremendous progress in racial justice and gender justice. Though it is not satisfying enough in some ways, this progress may give us reasons to believe that racial justice and gender justice will eventually be achieved.

People of color have been treated unfairly historically and contemporarily and it is not easy to eliminate racial discrimination. Derrick Bell describes the story of spirituals in his book, which made a deep impression on me. In the early years of the enslavement of Africans, “the slaves used their songs as a means of communication: giving warning, conveying information about escapes planned and carried out, and simply for uplifting the spirit and fortifying the soul.”[3] However, some white scholars concluded that “the basically primitive song-chants were not capable of complex development and were certainly too simplistic to convey sophisticated musical ideas”[4] and “those songs were not art.”[5] In my eyes as an archivist, the spirituals are a link within communities of enslaved people, an important way for them to build identity and collective memory, and a valuable spiritual treasure for all humankind, which enables the enslaved people to have a special and effective channel to care for each other and exchange feelings.

It is also worth noting that the intersection of race and gender makes some people’s voices more likely to be ignored. For example, compared with white women and Black men, Black women may be subject to the dual oppressions of sexism and racism. Kimberle Crenshaw, a leading scholar of critical race theory who developed the theory of intersectionality describes three Title VII cases: DeGraffenreid v General Motors, Moore v Hughes Helicopters and Payne v Travenol, in which the problems of intersectionality of race and sex are completely obscured. More specifically, she argues, “the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged Blacks.”[6] We need to realize that Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. 

Although the road to racial justice and gender justice can’t be flat, and it is full of broken stones and thorns, we still can notice that many people are making their contributions in their fields. Taking the field of Information Studies as an example, many scholars have made outstanding efforts to promote racial justice and gender justice. In Anthony Dunbar’s work, he tries to introduce critical race theory to archival discourse. He proposes, “research must be a shared vision between critical theorist and archivist of creating and recreating identities that are expressive of the lived experiences of marginalized populations.”[7] More specifically, he offers, “Critical race theory can assist in establishing a voice and identity for underrepresented and marginalized populations that can be expressed through an agency of self empowerment based on issues of significance to them,”[8] which encourages underrepresented groups to actively speak out, to record their unique memory and to build their common identities. In addition, through insightful discussion, combination and analysis of two distinct strands - archival theories of value and feminist standpoint epistemologies, Michelle Caswell proposes “a new archival appraisal theory, methodology, and political strategy”[9] named feminist standpoint appraisal. She argues, “for archivists from dominant groups, feminist standpoint appraisal offers an opportunity to align archival practice with oppressed communities by both acknowledging and dismantling oppressor standpoints and attempting to center oppressed standpoints.”[10] Last but not least, Safiya Noble’s book - Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Fobazi Ettarch’s research about Intersectional Librarianship have also made great contributions to promote racial justice and gender justice. The academic achievements related to race and gender issues in the field of Information Studies have aroused people’s attention, refection and discussion on racial justice and gender justice. And this kind of attention, refection and discussion makes more and more people aware of some social issues that they have previously ignored, and this awareness can be transformed into actions, and may even encourage people to make their own contributions to racial justice and gender justice in their work and life to a certain extent.

Similarly, outside the field of Information Studies, many people in other fields also have made their own contributions to gender justice and racial justice. With the joint efforts of people from all walks of life, tremendous progress has been made, for example, we have Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, we have Toni Morrison, a successful American novelist, essayist and professor, we can see that more and more people of color and more and more women play a pivotal role in study, work, and various areas in society. Although these are symbols, these examples may give us reasons to believe that the dream of justice will eventually come true.

I will end this piece where I started it. In response to the problems of discrimination, as a member of the Future of AERI Working Group, we are working on creating a Legal Defense fund to support archivists experiencing job discrimination. I firmly believe that a joyous daybreak will surely come.

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[1] Derrick Bell, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York: New York Press, 2005).

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. Chi. Legal f., (1989):139.

[7] Anthony Dunbar, “Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started.” Archival Science6, no.1(2006): 109-129.

[8] Ibid

[9] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, special issue on feminist ethics (2019). https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/113/67

[10] Ibid

Imagined Archival Futures as a Critique of Neoliberalism and Capitalist Realism | Dan Molloy

            The neoliberal transformation of American economy and government has consistently devalued archives as public services, instead viewing them for their potential market value.  This can be seen in the U.S. Office of Management and the Budget’s recent decision to close the Seattle National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) building in order to sell its property to housing developers and, according to the Public Buildings Reform Board, “generate the highest and best value” for the land due to a building maintenance backlog.[1]  Over the next four years, archival materials generated the Pacific Northwest will be shipped to NARA’s Kansas City, MI and Riverside, CA locations without input from local stakeholders and Indigenous governments across Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.  The closure demonstrates neoliberalism’s consistent investment in profit over preservation.  While a blow to the historical management of the Pacific Northwest, the closure of the Seattle NARA center is hardly surprising, and its callous reasoning aligns neoliberalism’s penchant for bureaucratic centralization, cuts to public spending, and mandate to generate revenue wherever an opening exists.

            The OMB’s reasoning behind Seattle NARA closure represents the hegemonic saturation of neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism presents itself as the natural progression of capitalism, treating “the market” as an entity whose freedom matters more than citizens.  This partially works to eliminate the possibility of other political formations, making the notion of an un-privatized world inconceivable.  The famous quote commonly attributed to Fredric Jameson (and occasionally Slavoj Žižek) which opens Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism— “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”—perfectly summarizes the pervasive sense of neoliberal hegemony in contemporary life.[2]  Closing the Seattle NARA center for property development appears to be the only available option because neoliberalism closes off the possibility of a government investing in a building whose mission inherently does not generate revenue.

Fisher later notes that “emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’” and “reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency” in order to “make what was previous deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”[3]  When confronting neoliberalism, there must be an alternative system to move towards.    While escapes from neoliberal ideology can appear impossible, critiques of the system necessarily rely on imagined possibilities in order to reframe the current system.  As part of a larger struggle to counteract and eventually overturn neoliberal policy and ideology, library and information studies workers can reclaim the imaginary as a liberating component of critical work.  Introducing a special issue on neoliberalism in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor write that critiquing neoliberal policy should function as “a form of everyday intellectual work aimed at exposing the many ways that power operates and how it has produced the status-quo stories we have been made to buy into.”[4]  As we “grapple with stark material realities through ongoing and largely unquestioned practices that continue to uphold inequalities and inequities,” archivists and LIS practitioners should interrogate the beneficiaries of power and decisions made by administrators.[5]  How, for instance, was it decided that the Seattle NARA property would be best suited to developing what will surely be hideous buildings with luxury apartments above a Whole Foods?  How does a facility which was by all accounts frequently visited and vitally important to certain community members become a burdensome budget?

Critiquing neoliberalism from the archival profession should go beyond only highlighting the corrupt relationship between private interests and public institutions by imagining an equitable structure.  Though the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and Society of American Archivists (SAA) issued a joint statement denouncing the OMB’s decision, their focus on the lack of information regarding the decision and its immediate negative impacts illustrate this form of limited critique.  Had the CoSA and SAA gone further and envisioned a fully funded and functional archive, whose users’ needs are met because its workers are organized and protected, they would at the very least have created an image of an organizational ideal.  Putting an imagined future into the field’s discourse moves institutional goals beyond the utility of each penny of funding and towards the construction of a stronger bond with the public and among the profession.  These imagined archival possibilities are crucial to archivists advocating for immediate needs.

Of course, imagined futures are hardly the definitive solution to overcoming an economic and ideological hegemony, but they play a vital role to instigate immediate action.  Rather, they serve as the starting point of enacting structural changes and building solidarity within and outside the profession towards a better future.  The possibility of a more equitable and dignified world ignites the ability to act immediately, locally, and directly.  David Harvey notes that capitalist powers “stumbled toward neoliberalism as the answer through a series of gyrations and chaotic experiments,” which is worth keeping in mind in striving for political and economic organizations which benefit humans over capital.[6]  As LIS workers seek to decondition themselves and the public of neoliberal ideology, it’s important to understand that the “natural order” of neoliberalism was as erratic and risky as what will succeed it.

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[1] Lacitis, Erik. “‘Terrible and Disgusting’: Decision to Close National Archives at Seattle a Blow to Tribes, Historians in 4 States.” The Seattle Times, January 25, 2020. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/terrible-and-disgusting-decision-to-close-national-archives-at-seattle-a-blow-to-tribes-historians-in-4-states/.

[2] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2009, page 2.

[3] Ibid 17.

[4] Lee, Jamie A., and Marika Cifor. “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (April 6, 2019), page 4. https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/122.

[5] Ibid 4.

[6] Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 13.

Shooting Spitballs at Tanks: Some Thoughts on Open Access and Academic Publishing – Caleb D Allen

     Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but: there is a specter haunting academia – the specter of well-meaning, but doomed initiatives to work around the stranglehold that a small collection of corporate publishers have on academic publishing and distribution, especially with respect to journals. By now, at least some of the names are likely familiar to you – Elsevier, SagePub, WileyBlackwell – or you’ve at least seen the names in passing in the last few years as a number of large university library systems have told these companies to go pound sand after lengthy, protracted contract negotiations over subscription fees.[1] Amid the debates and the frightful persistence of the question of “what is to be done?,” Open Access is floated as a means of combatting negative effects of publication paywalling while also maintaining the ability to publish in prestigious journal titles held by conglomerates like Elsevier.[2] However, despite what I am assuming are the best of intentions, Open Access is woefully flawed for two specific reasons: (1) certain models of Open Access are predicated on pay-to-publish models, demanding publication fees from authors who may or may not be able to pony up and (2) it is too easily folded into Elsevier’s­—and Elsevier-esque–business models.

            To begin at the beginning of this particular history is a bit too much to ask in such a compact space, nevertheless some explanation as to my targeting of certain publishers is warranted. One could say that a funny thing happened on the way to the future: as digital and networked technologies improved, distribution costs were supposed to plummet, making it so many varieties of information would become cheap or free. Instead, publishers responded with DRM tools and paywalls of many varieties.[3] This is only part of the story, however. A natural response to those who paywall scholarly content would be to publish and seek out information elsewhere, but tough luck! Not only does Elsevier publish some 25% of all scientific papers in the world, but the top five conglomerate publishers (Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and SagePub) published 50% of all academic papers in 2013.[4] From 1995 – 1998, and then 2001 – 2004 were both large periods of corporate consolidation for conglomerate publishers, likely due to smaller publishers being unable to keep afloat during the transition to the digital era![5] This industry-wide consolidation helps to explain why some of these publishers are able to approach profit margins of around 40%.[6] If ever there were a posterchild for neoliberal age, it would be hard to find a better example than these conglomerate publishers.[7]

            So, where does that leave us with Open Access and its inadequacies? In the first place, Open Access is not a unified body of practices, but rather a disparate set of practices which all bear something of a family resemblance: here I refer to the practices of publishing in Open Access journals (meaning free – at least at the point of access for the reader), or, as certain common university models mandate, one makes available free copies of a pre-publication version of a paper, then publishing a final–and perhaps altered version–elsewhere.[8] In the former model, it is not uncommon for those wishing to publish papers as Open Access to be charged for the privilege under the guise of author-processing charges (“APCs”).[9] This is fraught for any number of reasons: reliant on “publish or perish” paradigms, those within academia rely on publishing as a means of both starting and advancing their careers. In between generalized precarity resulting from disappearing tenure-track jobs, low pay, and inadequate stipends, academics are stuck bearing the stress of making ends meet, of meeting certain metrics or expectations, all while bearing the risk of failure individually. No doubt some lanyard-wearing perverts would salivate at such a description, arguing that this modern scholar-entrepreneur is in a position of maximal freedom, able to produce discreet units of knowledge liberated from the fusty, coddled and tenure-obsessed model of academia 1.0.[10] Furthermore, it seems that this displacement of both risk and cost to those needing to be published would help explain the rapacious profit margins enjoyed by Elsevier. The other glaring problem with Open Access is the fact that it is so easily co-opted: just recently, Carnegie Mellon University, after negotiations with Elsevier over the high cost of database subscription fees, inked a deal with the publisher allowing those affiliated with CMU to publish in Open Access journals![11] Once more, capital shows the ease with which it can absorb critique, transforming it into more dross to flog.[12]

            What is to be done? In the short term, it has been suggested that libraries step in and take the burden of publication on themselves, becoming both producers of and repositories for more radically open journals.[13] Though this would require that libraries receive more funding, hire specialized staff to deal with publishing, etc. while not also reproducing problematic labor conditions currently endemic to both academia and LIS institutions (non-contract and non-union labor, paid at non-living wages, and so on), there is something of a sober utopianism to this: why bother going through the credentialing needed to work in a university library when you are merely going to be party to violations of basic laws of librarianship with respect to journal access?[14] There have also been calls to re-evaluate what types of publications ought to “count” towards evaluating academic career performance; peer review is hardly the only method by which to referee and publish rigorous thinking, and it is certainly worth questioning whether or not those in the academy should only be publishing for others in the academy. After all, if “scholarship is going to intervene in the culture, it needs to be accessible.”[15] However, to do this, the academy itself must be reconceived; and any reconception must begin by shifting power back to labor, battling both in and outside of the academy, as the battle against ossified neoliberal structures cannot happen merely in one sphere. As some German once said: all that’s solid…

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[1] The most relevant of these for my–ahem­­–public would be the recent-ish parting between the University of California and Elsevier: see Dawn Setzer, “UC Ends Negotiations with Elsevier,” December 3, 2018, http://www.library.ucla.edu/news/uc-ends-negotiations-elsevier. The State University of New York was also in similar negotiations at the time. See: Kara Burke, “SUNY Contract with Academic Journal Database Elsevier Will Expire in December, Negotiations to Renew Are Fierce,” The Lamron, November 22, 2019, https://www.thelamron.com/posts/2019/11/22/lgbtq-support-groups-will-soon-switch-to-online-presence-through-closed-facebook-groups. Still, its an evergreen topic and worth a bing, or a google, or asking some poor stranger on Grindr about it. Better yet: ask a librarian.

[3] Jacob Silverman, “Sci-Hub vs. the Scarcity-Mongers,” The Baffler, April 1, 2016, https://thebaffler.com/latest/scarcity-mongers-silverman. Whether or not these expectations were simplistic or naïve is a discussion worth having, though I am reticent to fault utopianism of this variety.

[4] Editorial, “The Guardian View on Academic Publishing: Disastrous Capitalism | Editorial,” The Guardian, March 4, 2019, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/04/the-guardian-view-on-academic-publishing-disastrous-capitalism. Regarding figures on the “top five”, see Larivière et al Dave Ghamandi, “Liberation through Cooperation: How Library Publishing Can Save Scholarly Journals from Neoliberalism,” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 6, no. 2 (August 31, 2018): eP2223, https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2223. For those interested in a disciplinary breakdown, social science publishing is the most concentrated at 70%, with the humanities clocking in at 20%. The natural sciences and medical sciences are “in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies.” For more, see Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.

[5] Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” So much for utopia. Unsurprisingly, while the digital does decrease distribution at a certain point, re-tooling production and distribution carries with it certain infrastructural costs that would likely be quite burdensome to smaller publishers.

[6] Silverman, “Sci-Hub vs. the Scarcity-Mongers.” For comparison, large trade publishers like Penguin and Simon & Schuster reported 16% margins in 2018. See Nicoloa Solomon, “The Profits from Publishing: Authors’ Perspective,” The Bookseller, March 2, 2018, https://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/profits-publishing-authors-perspective-743226.

[7] David Harvey, “Freedom’s Just Another Word...,” in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond the Headlines Series, 2005), 26. The neoliberal era, for Harvey, is one that (in spite of promises to the opposite) fosters the consolidation of monopoly power in industry thanks to intensive deregulation.

[8] This prepublication and final article model is commonly referred to as “Green” Open Access. Joe Karaganis, “Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below,” in Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, ed. Joe Karaganis (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2018), 19. This is also, at present, the model employed by UCLA. It should be noted that, in the case of the UC system, this only applies to things published after a certain date. The University of California, “UC Open Access Policies,” UCLA Library, n.d., https://www.library.ucla.edu/support/publishing-data-management/information-authors/uc-open-access-policy.

[9] Ghamandi, “Liberation through Cooperation.” It should be noted that, in a practice referred to as “double-dipping,” Elsevier has been caught charging for access to articles published in Open Access journals in which authors did have to pay APCs. Martin Paul Eve, “On Open-Access Books and ‘Double Dipping,’” Martin Paul Eve, January 31, 2015, https://eve.gd/2015/01/31/on-open-access-books-and-double-dipping/.

[10] This is, I believe, what Harvey would refer to as a neoliberal frame of thinking (Harvey, “Freedom’s Just Another Word...”). Also, as meagre stipends were referenced earlier, it is incumbent on me to deliver a hearty “fuck you” to Janet Napolitano. Janet, buddy, on the off chance you’re reading this, just resign. Also, it should be said that “lanyard-wearing perverts” is something of a catch-all for certain entrepreneurial tech types, pretty much anyone who has worked at a think tank, salivates over terminology like “public-private partnership,” and worships a fickle god known as “the market.” Think Pete Buttigieg, maybe Neera Tanden if you’re feeling particularly wild…

[11] Julie Mattera, “Carnegie Mellon Publishing Agreement Marks Open Access Milestone - News - Carnegie Mellon University,” Carnegie Mellon University News, November 21, 2019, http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/november/cmu-publishing-agreement-milestone.html.

[12] Fromm, “Review: The Hegemony of ‘Hegemony’: Criticism, Capitalism, and Being the World,” The Georgia Review 42, no. 1 (1988): 183.

[13] Ghamandi, “Liberation through Cooperation,” 11 – 13.

[14] Repeat after me: every book (or journal), its reader….you should know how this goes. S.R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science (Madras: The Madras Library Association, 1931), 299.

[15] Laura Elkin, “The Digital Critic as Public Critic: Open Source, Paywalls, and the Nature of Criticism,” in The

Digital Critic: Literacy Culture Online , ed. Houman Barekat, Robert Barry, and David Winters (New York: OR

Books, 2017), 60.