Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions

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Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Document généré le 7 nov. 2025 05:02 Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire Message from the Grassroots Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions Camille Marcos Noûs Volume 7, 2021 Special Focus on Refusing Crisis Narratives URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1084795ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36448 Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians / Association Canadienne des Bibliothécaires en Enseignement Supérieur ISSN 2369-937X (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Noûs, C. (2021). Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship / Revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire, 7, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36448 Résumé de l'article Les bibliothécaires ont répondu à la crise des périodiques qui dure depuis des décennies avec un récit commun et une gamme de réponses qui n'ont pas réussi à remettre en question l'idéologie et les structures qui l'ont provoquée. En utilisant la théorie du guérillero intellectuel de Walter Rodney, nous examinons de manière critique la compréhension dominante de la soi-disant crise et soulignons le rôle que le capital y joue. La nature impériale de l'édition de revues savantes et certaines de ses nombreuses contradictions sont discutées. Les accords transformateurs reçoivent une attention particulière en tant que manifestation hyper-capitaliste de ces contradictions au cœur de l'édition commerciale. La politique du refus est une réponse au mercantilisme, au prestige et aux déséquilibres de pouvoir qui animent le système d'édition universitaire. Soulignant les différences entre refus et réforme, cet article explore le rôle principal que les bibliothécaires peuvent jouer dans une lutte prolongée à l'intérieur et au-delà des limites de notre profession. Cet article prévoit aller au-delà du discours traditionnel qui porte le blâme uniquement sur l'oligopole de l'édition universitaire et dévoile l'utilisation de la production de savoir pour l'accumulation de capital par l'académie bourgeoise. Noûs, Camille Marcos. 2021. “Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu. v7.36448 © Camille Marcos Noûs, CC BY-NC 4.0. Message from the Grassroots: Scholarly Communication, Crisis, and Contradictions Camille Marcos Noûs 1 1. This work is the result of a collective and was shaped by generous contributions from editors, peer reviewers, and our communities. We recommend that readers resist the urge to speculate about the authorship and, instead, use your valuable time to engage with our analysis and conclusions. ABSTRACT Librarians have responded to the decades-long “serials crisis” with a common narrative and a range of responses that have failed to challenge the ideology and structures that caused it. Using Walter Rodney’s theory of the guerilla intellectual, we critically examine the dominant understanding of this so-called crisis and emphasize the role that capital plays within it. The imperial nature of scholarly journal publishing and some of its many contradictions are discussed. “Transformative” agreements receive special attention as a hyper-capitalist manifestation of these contradictions at the heart of commercial publishing. The politics of refusal are one response to the commercialism, prestige, and power imbalances that drive the academic publishing system. Highlighting the differences between refusal and reform, this paper explores the protagonistic role that librarians can play in a protracted struggle within and beyond the confines of our profession. This paper is intended to move beyond the traditional discourse of laying blame solely at the feet of the academic publishing oligopoly and expounds on the bourgeois academy’s use of knowledge production for capital accumulation. Keywords: big deals · crisis · imperialism · prestige · publishing · scholarly communication · serials crisis · transformative agreements RÉSUMÉ Les bibliothécaires ont répondu à la crise des périodiques qui dure depuis des décennies avec un récit commun et une gamme de réponses qui n'ont pas réussi à remettre en question l'idéologie et les structures qui l'ont provoquée. En utilisant la théorie du guérillero intellectuel de Walter Rodney, nous examinons de manière critique la compréhension dominante de la soi-disant crise et soulignons le rôle que le capital y joue. La nature impériale de l'édition de revues savantes et certaines de ses nombreuses contradictions sont discutées. Les accords transformateurs reçoivent une attention particulière en tant que manifestation hyper-capitaliste de ces contradictions au cœur de l'édition commerciale. La politique du refus est une réponse au mercantilisme, au prestige canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 2 et aux déséquilibres de pouvoir qui animent le système d'édition universitaire. Soulignant les différences entre refus et réforme, cet article explore le rôle principal que les bibliothécaires peuvent jouer dans une lutte prolongée à l'intérieur et au-delà des limites de notre profession. Cet article prévoit aller au-delà du discours traditionnel qui porte le blâme uniquement sur l'oligopole de l'édition universitaire et dévoile l'utilisation de la production de savoir pour l'accumulation de capital par l'académie bourgeoise. Mots-clés : accords transformateurs · communications savantes · crise · crise des périodiques · édition · grands ensembles de périodiques · impérialisme · prestige Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee. Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek. Revolutions are never based upon love-your-enemy and pray-forthose-who-despitefully-use-you. And revolutions are never waged singing “We Shall Overcome.” Revolutions are based on bloodshed. Revolutions are never compromising. Revolutions are never based upon negotiations. Revolutions are never based upon any kind of tokenism whatsoever. Revolutions are never even based upon that which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to accept us into it. Revolutions overturn systems. – Malcolm X, “The Black Revolution” DE SPI T E an increase in the amount of scholarly literature that is open access (OA), readers and institutions are still unable to access (read and reuse, in formats that suit them) all of their desired journal articles. This lack of access is commonly described as a “serials crisis,” and the narrative of this crisis has persisted for several decades. To understand how a crisis can persist for over 40 years, who it affects, and why the structural problems persist, we find it helpful to utilize Walter Rodney’s (2019) theory of the guerrilla intellectual. Rodney tasked scholar-activists with challenging bourgeois knowledge and to begin by attacking the ideas within one’s own discipline. As academic library workers, we will critically examine the history and dominant narrative of the serials crisis with special attention to the role library workers play in perpetuating the status quo and serving the power elite. Later in the first section we will introduce a materialist analysis to describe the underlying contradictions in academic knowledge creation and journal publishing as a counterpoint to the dominant liberal viewpoint. In the second section we will discuss the politics of refusal and protagonistic praxis as a means of responding to the crisis. This includes the need to collectively reject capital accumulation by both the university and scholarly publishers. Prestige is the mechanism by which symbolic capital is transformed into material wealth. Because prestige is a currency in academia and implicated in the injustices we canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 3 discuss, we are publishing pseudonymously. Our pseudonym is both a commitment to collectivity and a refusal to self-promote (Grande 2018, 61). It is also conveniently provided by Subcomandante-Formerly-Known-as-Marcos of the Zapatistas, who reminds us that “everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable—this is Marcos” (Marcos 1994). This is our small goal in this piece. We hope our creation of alternative epistemologies about scholarly production can be used both in refusal and in action. Where Are We and How Did We Get Here? The serials crisis is a political manifestation of class structures. Social and economic inequalities (of purchasing budgets, of access, of who is represented in that access) are not natural. They are produced, largely by the university-as-employer and the larger system of capital accumulation that scholarly publishers benefit from. Looking at this system of inequality—not just the individual library workers who have some role in it—is crucial to identifying sites of oppression. It is possible to talk about the serials crisis without talking about these larger systems of exploitation, but one’s analysis would be incomplete. Two dominant and interconnected narratives regarding the serials crisis have developed over the past forty years and persist today—one of unsustainable costs and another of open access as a solution. As early as 1981, the word crisis was used to describe serials subscription prices rising faster than both inflation and collections budgets (Grathwol 1982, 408). One librarian wrote that a 1990 serials crisis at their institution gave them “a strong sense of déjà vu” and prompted them to revisit a 1981 serials crisis and journal cancellation project (Roth 1990, 123). A 1982 summary of what led to the so-called crisis blamed the 1970s hyperinflation, a greater quantity of publications, and space issues within libraries (Milne 1999, 74), but it is worth noting that this inability to afford subscription access to literature became a crisis only when it started to affect wealthier schools that were accustomed to having ready access. Less wealthy schools’ and international readers’ lack of access was never framed as a crisis—it was an acceptable inequality in a neoliberal “free market” framework. Early strategies to mitigate the effects of rising prices included consulting faculty on journal cancellations, conducting citation analyses of faculty publications, gathering journal usage statistics, and developing core title lists (Grathwol 1982; Roth 1990). Such strategies are still employed in present time, especially among schools looking to end their Big “Deal” contracts. Promising more robust interlibrary loan and document delivery services as a means of managing crisis-induced serials cancellations is a relatively old strategy as well (Kilpatrick and Preece 1996). In the 1990s, the discourse expanded to incorporate a more managerial, business-minded canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 4 body of research. Kimberly Douglas (1990) explored a “practice of entrepreneurship,” integrating the ideas of management consultant Peter Drucker. Ross Atkinson (1994) discussed crisis and opportunity in an Age of Transition. In the 1990s, the crisis discourse became more alarmist: after 454 journal titles were cut at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Jeanie Welch (1996) authored an article asking, “Is there life after serials cancellation?” OA Responses to Serials Crisis The crisis was largely described from the 1980s to 2000s as one of an unsustainable market, imperfect or subject to distortions such as lack of direct price sensitivity of academics, where universities and their libraries were separated out from their role as producers to just that of consumers. Free markets as the only possibility for the distribution of goods and services are, of course, inextricably linked to the capitalist ideology of neoliberalism. This framing of commercial scholarly publishing as an imperfect market (that still must remain commercial in nature)—rather than as evidence of the commodification of knowledge, collective imperialism and some of the deep contradictions within capitalism—also frames many of the responses to the serials crisis. ,2 2. Used by Samir Amin (2014) to describe the post-70’s imperialism characterized by a Global North collaborating to ensure the continued exploitation of the Global South. The second dominant narrative of the serials crisis, focusing on open access, began in the late 1990s. E-journals were discussed as a way to “survive the crisis” as early as 1995 (Davis 1995), but open access would become thought of as the cure for the crisis at the turn of the century. Three very influential statements were issued in a short span that would shape the subsequent discourse: the Budapest Open Access Initiative public statement in 2002, the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. One of the impacts of framing the serials crisis as a market issue— either a market failure, or an oligopoly market doing exactly what it is supposed to do—is that the solutions often focus on “access.” Access itself is a broad term that encompasses things like physical access, access in a suitable format, persistent access, culturally or linguistically appropriate access, and access in a way that is barrier free depending on one’s race, class, housing status, or perceived sobriety. While scholars such as April Hathcock (2018) and David James Hudson (2017) have critically interrogated access, it is more often treated by librarians and administrators as a neutral good that libraries as consumers are striving for. Hathcock points out that access is intertwined with exclusion and that access should not just mean online, but 3 3. Sam Moore describes how the focus on access to information is one particular lineage of Open Access, distinct from approaches that derive from open source and remixing (2019, 63). canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 5 truly accessible. And Hudson notes that “universalizing access” (205) is part of the way the language of practicality in librarianship obscures and normalizes the whiteness at its purportedly neutral roots. In this case, access is reduced to a subscription and open access becomes a lever to lower the price of that access. The neoliberal goal becomes (in their language) using market mechanisms to effect cost savings on the consumer good of scholarly articles for the given library. Access is provided through purchasing or licensing (don’t mention SciHub) for a narrowly defined set of users. As Charlotte Roh, Harrison Inefuku, and Emily Drabinski (2020) say, “access does not necessarily mean equality, and sometimes does not even mean equality of access” (41). The dominant way of approaching cost reduction in libraries is through breaking up Big Deal agreements, maintaining access to key resources while reducing library spend. In reaction to austerity budgets in the last decade, individual libraries and consortia are trying to negotiate or apply market mechanisms in large enough numbers to have an effect on the market. Open access is seen as part of a consumer response to publisher prices (Moore 2019, 76-77) and is used with increasing frequency as a tool to provide alternative access and/or to pressure publishers to lower prices. This instrumentalist (or, as David James Hudson might say, pragmatic) position does little to interrogate or question whether knowledge should be treated as a commodity in a commercial market and whether capitalist markets are ever at the mercy of consumers. Open access is in itself not a politics. There are innumerable political positions within the open access movement; some openly stated, some masked. There are a number of strategies around open access that recognize that part, if not all, of the serials problem lies in oppressive and exploitative models and practices of publishing. Typically, they target the concentration of capital and wealth in the hands of a few oligopolies, and therefore couch themselves in some sort of redistributive language, including: Redistribution of budgets. Invest in Open, the 2.5% commitment (Lewis et al. 2018), and other forms of “divest and rebalance” all imply a redistribution of library spend, to try to prioritize open access projects and infrastructure, to divert some funds away from the obvious oligopolies. A lot of the little organizations that fill this space are very much at the mercy of grants from philanthro-capitalist NGOs—organizations that are themselves a redistribution of the gross profits made by capitalists. Changing the balance of power. This includes strategies that try to rebalance power relations by forming blocs large enough to counter the oligopolies. Regional or national consortia, or even cOAlition S, sometimes imply they are strategies to redistribute power. These consortia are usually composed of administrators, directors, canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 6 and other senior decision makers from research-intensive universities, so while they may try to counterbalance power, there is very little grassroots redistribution. And they still fulfil their real redistributive function, that of transferring public money to private corporations. Stopping the (complete) transfer of intellectual property (IP). Recognizing that IP is an asset valuable to capital, some strategies are aimed at ensuring that authors’ IP transfer is non-exclusive (e.g., Creative Commons licenses, publication addendums, university policy that authors retain rights, and even the Taverne Amendment ). The approaches don’t necessarily challenge the property nature of IP but try to redistribute the rights to it. 4 4. A Dutch law that prevents academics from signing away exclusive rights to their academic works. Redistributing prestige. While prestige as a concept is constantly under attack in academia, often this critique has to do with the distribution of prestige—skewed towards legacy journals and the anglo, white male authors that predominate the “prestigious” rankings in given fields. Whiteness, and the priority given to English language and cultures (anglo supremacy), cloaks itself in prestige by becoming an obscured assumption and baseline (only occasionally made evident when we look at what is indexed in Web of Science and SCOPUS [Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2015], for example). Critical bibliometrics and their critiques of the journal impact factor (JIF), universities signing the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the inclusion of commitments against JIF in tenure and promotion assessments, are some strategies that attempt to redistribute prestige. However, these strategies are constantly undermined as the same players continue to pursue prestige/competitive advantage in other forms. The relationship between prestige and the surplus value extracted by the university-as-employer is, however, difficult to address in its entirety, particularly when there is a split focus on the additional surplus value extracted by publishers. As Philippe Askenazy reminds us, “To redistribute is not to distribute” (2021, 26). Fundamentally, redistribution can only happen after an already unequal allocation of power and resources. While most of the strategies to address the serials crisis are redistributive to some degree or another (whether in a deeply challenging way or in a more surface approach), some do also try to approach changing the primary distribution of power itself (or to allow scholars to directly commodify their labour-power themselves). Such approaches sometimes implicitly also challenge the commodity nature of knowledge and our reliance on commercial markets for its distribution. These include: Institutional repositories (IRs) and preprint servers. IRs and preprints are sometimes positioned almost as a way to build dual power—an alternative system that can fulfill canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 7 the same needs as the publishing oligopoly. However, IRs in particular are not as fully separate from the rest of the publishing system as they may seem and still do not have the primary trust of users, particularly those still in search of prestige. Collective ownership. Particularly around scholarly communication infrastructure (which might be interpreted as the means of production), projects like the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems attempt to collectively design and contribute to infrastructure that can be used by anyone. Projects like ScholarLed also seek collective governance and sharing solutions collaboratively rather than competitively. Organizing labour. There have been various attempts to organize boycotts of “free” labour given to publishers (with Elsevier as a common target), mass resignations of editorial boards, as well as calls to unionize the specific labour that is done for publishers. This type of organization has not had much notable effect, possibly because, as Sam Popowich (2021) points out, the “upper strata of academics refuse to see themselves as workers at all,” limiting how academics are willing to organize and take action. Capital has been remarkably adaptable in the face of all these strategies, with new ways to exploit and extract labour constantly appearing along with new ways to extract profits from library and institutional budgets (a process akin to privatization, as public funds end up in privateering coffers). Capital’s response to institutional repositories provides a good example. Early champions of open access (the authors included) often saw self-archiving/ green open access as a subterranean way of meeting an access need that could occur outside of the market. After ePrints came out in late 2000, IRs were frequently positioned as a parallel option that addressed reading access issues easily with low cost and increasing funder buy-in in a way that didn’t necessarily directly challenge legacy publishers. For “developing” nations, Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop, and Subbiah Arunachalam (2005) proposed that IRs would enable not just international, but domestic access to scholarship produced in those countries, while also increasing prestige and research impact (4-5). While many IRs in North America still struggle with uneven and low uptake (Peter Suber’s question in 2002, “So if it’s easy, free, useful, and ready right now, why isn’t it spreading faster?” now seems eternal), some flourish. IRs have become instrumental in meeting Research Excellence Frameworks (like REF21) for universities in the UK, which has increased access (though likely not anyone’s actual happiness with IRs). Indeed, Heather Piwowar (2019) made a compelling argument for the rise of repositories, showing that open repository data is reaching more users than ever. Samuel Moore sees the zero-embargo push for 5 5. Later, Albornoz, Okune, and Chan (2020) recognized that OA often replicates the power imbalances it was seeking to challenge. canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 8 repository copies in Plan S as progressive (2021), at least compared to the APC-based open access options.6 6. This is not by any stretch a complete history of Open Access, which is a very contested and contradictory ground. See Reassembling Scholarly Communications (Eve and Gray 2020), Moore (2019), and Lawson (2019) for some of that work. But as the “low-cost” option of IRs rose, so too did the pay-to-play options for open access, further commercializing academia. Article processing charges (APCs) have become ubiquitous, some with astronomical prices like the $10,000+ cost for a single open access article in Nature journals (Brainard, 2020). Bjorn Brembs warned us that high APCs were predicted early on by many leading open access scholars— not least because of the continued separation of researchers from the direct costs of scholarly publishing (2020). In 2013, Stephen Pinfield recognized that APC inflation may be the new serials crisis. Rising far faster than inflation, APCs have given rise to thousands of hybrid journals—charging both open access fees for certain articles as well as subscription fees for entire issues—and provided a new form of profit extraction in the already very profitable industry of scholarly publishing (Khoo, 2019). Elsevier, for example, created 100 open access journals in just nine months in 2020 (Abrahams, 2020). “Transformative” Agreements The dominant response to APC inflation has, unsurprisingly, focused on marketbased tactics of negotiation (from those with the power to negotiate) and has resulted in the massive increases of consortia and library systems (and costs associated with them) entering into “transformative” agreements—or what Meg Wacha has termed “Big Deals for APCs” (2019). Transformative agreements (TAs) are a variety of different types of large contracts that typically cover subscribing to an entire publisher catalogue (or subset thereof) and having university (or national) articles published open access for free with that publisher. Costs may be based on historical subscription prices (read & publish), historical publication amounts (publish & read), an offset or a discount on APCs, or a hybrid of these. However the costs are set, they still represent monumental amounts of money. Like the rest of the neoliberal market / access-based solutions, the larger political economy of TAs is usually ignored by universities and consortia in the Global North. Meanwhile, scholars such as Arianna Becerril-Garcia and Eduardo Aguado-López (2020) and Joy Owango (2020) continue to show who is excluded from these agreements—countries and libraries that cannot afford to pay the costs, predominantly in the Global South, and systems like those in Latin America that have historically resisted commercialization and APCs entirely. TAs show us, perhaps even more starkly, that these pricing crises are manufactured by capitalism and the important role that imperialism plays in canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 15 Librarians, Coercion, and Consent Librarians’ role in the aforementioned serials crisis and broader knowledge production and international publishing processes warrant further examination. Librarians are reduced to being the caretakers of the contradictions that we describe. We find Antonio Gramsci’s concept of coercion and consent to be a useful framework for this part of the analysis (Ramos Jr., 1982). Gramsci argued that the ruling class maintained its hegemony through a mixture of coercion and consent. In our context, coercion partly explains the pressure that collections and acquisitions librarians feel to fulfill the institution’s demand for scholarly literature. The disciplinary nature of the wage system steers these librarians away from disrupting article access and the university’s capital accumulation process. However, the ruling class maintains its hegemony more seamlessly through consensus than coercion. This means that librarians’ ideological alignment with the elites helps to significantly perpetuate the status quo. When librarians share the same system of values, beliefs, and ideals with the ruling class they do not need to be coerced into trying to find a cure for the serials crisis that preserves the establishment’s power. Sam Popowich’s (2019) exploration of liberalism in the profession is insightful and provides a useful context. If librarians and employers mainly agree in their core beliefs, including liberal tenets of individualism and respect for private property, then the acceptable parameters of thought and behavior remain fairly narrow. Freire’s conception of adhesion to one’s oppressor and Ettarh’s (2018) theory of vocational awe both apply here as well. Librarians’ belief in the inherent goodness of the profession, as Ettarh expertly elucidated, combined with Freire’s observation that the oppressed tend to follow the ruling class’s ideology helps explain why many work towards reforming serials publishing rather than replacing the structure. The seemingly natural response to a serials crisis is to work towards restoring the system to its former state, which benefited elite universities and to sidestep issues of hierarchy, racism, and exploitation. Mediating scholarly communication in a market system is unproblematic from a liberal perspective because liberalism respects individual choice, private property, and capitalism. Once again, change becomes just a matter of tinkering at the edges. The power of consent, however, may be waning as the existing contradictions heighten and new ones appear. As more librarians become conscious of the fact that OA is not by itself liberating, the ruling class propaganda becomes less effective. As is often the case with crises, the private sector is often bailed out with a large cash infusion from the state. So, in some respects, TAs are no different than bailing out the housing and auto industries. Being “too big to fail” is a profitable condition, and the state treats the publishing oligopoly in that manner. canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 16 Where Do We Want To Go & How Do We Get There? Given the assumptions built into a crisis narrative and the inability of mainstream open access efforts to address root causes, what role might the politics of refusal play? Faced with intensifying contradictions and the recognition that the university, like other workplaces, is a site of domination, hierarchy, and exploitation, grappling with refusal theory seems appropriate. If we decentre ourselves and recognize the university’s broader historical function as “the institutional nexus for the capitalist and religious missions of the settler state, mirroring its histories of dispossession, enslavement, exclusion, forces assimilation, and integration,” (Grande 2018, 47-48) then the politics of refusal could have major implications for scholarly communication. We begin this final section by differentiating between refusal and reform before moving into a discussion of librarians as protagonists. We will introduce Walter Rodney’s model of the guerilla intellectual and his groundings methodology. Finally, we will examine particular publishing efforts through the lens of refusal. Reform, Resistance, and Refusal Crisis rhetoric in higher education and other public sectors often instils fear: fear of less tuition, fear of lack of public funding (and more intangible support), fear that the only solution is to become a more aggressive competitor, to turn more to the private sector, to market more and more to students as consumers. In libraries, the serial crisis feeds on a fear of decreasing budgets, loss of access for angry consumers (faculty and students alike), fear of a university system that doesn’t see libraries (and their subscriptions) as valuable. The same solutions—turning to the private sector, increasing competition for prestige by maintaining collections/access, and marketing libraries as part of student satisfaction—keep the crisis narrative going. TAs simply come to the aid of capital while giving the appearance of redistribution. Status quo defenders and liberal reformists adhere economically and ideologically to the existing power structure, typically benefiting from it so that their role becomes to contain opposition and blunt the calls for change. But as Samir Amin points out, we need strategies that are not just “exits from the crisis,” but rather strategies that are aimed at an “exit from capitalism in crisis” (2009). While reformism smooths over the contradictions of capitalism, and enables power relations to remain fundamentally unchanged, other approaches challenge and create alternatives. There is a long history of various forms of counter-hegemonic thought and struggle that seek the cracks in hegemony and create alternatives within them. We appreciate the politics of refusal coined by Audra Simpson and outlined by Sandy Grande because past reformist efforts have failed to centre power, exploitation, and canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 17 material structures, wasting collective time and energy and continuing to be rooted in the same neoliberal logics that have produced and sustained the crisis. Resistance, rather than refusal, may be a more familiar strategy. Resistance in the academy typically gets reduced to critique, rather than strikes or labour action (Popowich 2019, 269), but there are a wide variety of forms resistance can take. Riyad A. Shahjahan (2014), building on work from David Jeffress, delineates particular strategies of resistance in the academy, using four main types of resistance frameworks. The first, cultural resistance, focuses on writing from the margins and keeping alternative epistemologies alive and active. Critiques that focus on the lack of diversity/representation would fall in this category, such as many of the critiques around bibliodiversity (Chan 2019a) or the lack of diversity in publishing (Roh 2016). We recognize, as many critical scholars do, that while representation and inclusion have some value, inclusion in repressive structures like the university does not constitute power and is not inherently liberating. The distinction between being antidiscriminatory and being anti-oppressive is important. It is the difference between wanting change that gets rid of roadblocks to your own advancement and wanting change towards justice and liberation. The second framework, resistance as opposition, includes actions like protests, social mobilization, and direct challenges to labour practices including demanding more equitable hiring or mobilizing to resist restructuring. Some of the distributive strategies fall within this category of resistance, such as direct opposition and mobilization against increasing metrics of prestige. Shahjahan recognizes that while these struggles may necessarily be broad and mask heterogeneity, sometimes strategic essentialism is useful in order to unite people’s opposition (2014, 227). The remaining two forms of resistance, resistance as subversion and transformative resistance, include everyday refusals of the neoliberal project and its logic. These frameworks normalize new relationships and change oppressive narratives and material structures, all of which may be better suited to the politics of refusal than of resistance. Grande cautions that resistance in itself is not necessarily against the interests of the state or capital. Power structures will often recognize, negotiate with, and, therefore, weaken resistance. However, refusal offers a model that cannot be easily subsumed and is a more dangerous threat to the system because of the radical doubt it casts on the institutions and their authority (2018, 59). With refusal, the power of the gifts and concessions of reform is stripped from the institution. They can no longer be in the role of reasonable benefactor or benevolent authority. Refusal in academia, canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 18 in scholarly communication, means ceasing to negotiate, ceasing to recognize the extractive publishers and give them the benefit of our engagement. A politics of refusal for scholarly communication should refuse whiteness and the practicality we disguise it with. As David James Hudson explains, “the exaltation of practicality certainly connects at some level… to our explicitly articulated commitment to access, to a politics of inclusion that seeks to structure resources, services, and spaces so as to eliminate barriers for users” (Hudson 2017, 211). We need to reject that our roles are only to offer access to literature, and we should refuse to acknowledge structures such as APCs that continue to deny the ability of all to participate on equal terms. We also should reject the idea that the only way to address inequality in scholarly communication is through redistributive efforts and refuse to continue participating in and celebrating these deals on our campuses. We need to refuse to keep funding the sketchy data practices of our vendors. Many of these companies need to be defunded. We also need to refuse the notion that the only alternative to paying into commercial oligopolies is accepting philanthro-capitalist guilt-money, and we definitely need to refuse the IP restrictions that come with that funding. We need to refuse the individual premise of intellectual property entirely, while still recognizing our debts to the communities of knowledge that have come before us. We need to find practices that refuse individuality and prestige, that cease to engage with the myth of heroes and saviours in open access, and that cease to accrue citations and prestige for the critics. We need to refuse crisis narratives that serve capitalism, particularly when they imply neoliberal solutions. We need to start collectively refusing our labour and time as solidarity. And as Grande notes, instead of using our time to call for more diversity, inclusion, and safety within the academy and publishing, we need to build guerilla spaces of sovereignty outside of academia (2018, 60) (possibly by pirating its funds). All of these forms of refusal are generative, maybe even transformative (!), to the degree that they imagine (and in many contexts, remember) communality, collectivism, solidarity, and liberation. 7 7. We suggest, for example, writing collectively and pseudonymously. Protagonistic Practice Because refusal has been theorized as a protagonistic action by Robin D. G. Kelley (2016), Grande (2018), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), and others, we must discuss what librarians could actively bring forth in our words and deeds. Walter Rodney (2019), a Guyanese Black Marxist scholar, contributed the theory of the guerilla intellectual and a groundings methodology and pedagogical praxis to this area. Rodney’s guerilla intellectual begins their journey with refusal: of capitalism, canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 19 the (white) bourgeois academy, and the comforts these afford many scholars. This intellectual is a scholar-activist who “must actively wage a struggle for the terrain of academia, of knowledge production, of knowledge distribution” (Benjamin and Springer 2019). They do not seek to reform bourgeois institutions and instead have three tasks. As Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer describe, Rodney proposed to Black audiences that one becomes a guerilla intellectual: (1) by attacking within their own discipline the distortions which white bourgeois cultural imperialism has brought about, (2) to then move beyond their own discipline to challenge social myths concerning racialized society and history, and lastly (3) they must attach themselves to the activity of the Black masses. The guerilla intellectual-librarian redistributes critical knowledge and histories in our communities while aiding in constructing new and liberating knowledge. Rodney’s method for accomplishing this was done through a groundings praxis. This methodology aimed to transform power and upset hierarchies through participation in non-hierarchical grounding, or reasoning, sessions within one’s communities. In these sessions critical knowledge and histories are shared and produced with the goals of increasing political consciousness and supporting liberating actions (Rodney 2019). Librarians are well positioned to expropriate knowledge and resources and, when necessary, disregard copyright law to share them. Sharing DIY methods of knowledge distribution like zine-making is an example of skill sharing that can be used towards political goals. It is impossible to engage with the guerrilla intellectual’s third task on paper. It is also worth noting that Rodney had an expansive definition of who is Black. “[They] are non-whites—the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas” (Rodney 2019, 10). Black folks, therefore, are the masses, the global majority, and the historically colonized people, which includes the US’s internal colonies. Black guerilla intellectuals must commit class suicide in order to truly ground and be in solidarity with the Black masses (Adeleke 2000, 48). And aspiring white guerilla intellectuals must accept leadership from Black folk, who are experts in their own oppression. Only after this solidarity is built can we begin to, among other things, co-destruct the academy (Benjamin and Springer 2019). Some librarians are already subverting the academy from within and can do so in better ways by working collectively. Putting these ideas into motion is a difficult task, even for the Zapatistas: Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés said “we say ‘collectively,’ but one needs a lot of practice in order to figure out how to do that” (2015). How collective practice looks can differ from participation in trade unions to working in smaller affinity groups. Either way, building networks of solidarity, support, canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 20 communication, and defense is a necessity for those who refuse. Some librarians are capable of redistributing money to closely aligned outside groups, while others may only be able to share their time, expertise, and energy. Working collectively helps us develop stronger counternarratives for the never-ending propaganda, lies, myths, and distortions that we face. It also provides a hedge against the trap of individualism, egos, and the dominance of charismatic, messianic (white) figures. Final Interrogations Philanthrocapitalism describes the tendency of philanthropy to resemble for-profit entities, with emphases on returns on investment and quantitative results (Ramdas 2011). One could argue that the elite’s use of philanthropic enterprises to shape the library and information science world in their ideology and morality is not new. Andrew Carnegie’s legacy of libraries was built on the exploitation of his workers and the natural world. He patronizingly stated to workers “what you needed, though you didn’t know it, was my libraries and concert halls. And that’s what I’m giving to you” (Stamberg 2013). Criticism of Carnegie’s effect on local communities is longstanding (Mickelson 1975). Today’s philanthro-capitalists, however, have global (meaning imperial) ambitions. Ramdas (2011) summarizes the critique of these ambitions as “[opposition] to the policymaking and agenda-setting powers that tend to accompany this new global elite.” In scholarly communication, grants are not charity, but rather capital set in motion to create a return for the philanthro-capitalist. This comes in the form of reputation laundering and, we speculate, future commercialization of open access research and accompanying open source tools and infrastructure. Despite any good intentions, grant recipients are influenced by the philanthrocapitalist’s ideology. One must prove themselves to be trustworthy to the grantmaker, which may include compromising one’s values along the way. Either willingly or unknowingly, by accepting a grant, the recipient becomes a tool of the philanthrocapitalist and their imperial ambitions. Any good that comes from a grant-funded project cannot be fully realized while we are collectively subordinate to capital and the ruling elite. 8 8. Philanthropies lower their taxable income as well. No discussion of refusal in serials publishing (and scholarly publishing more broadly) would be complete without identifying some efforts making honest attempts to challenge the status quo. Redalyc, a university-based OA publishing platform based in Mexico but now open to journals from any country, is rooted in a non-commercial and no-APC model. It is a major constituent of AmeliCA, a broader coalition that provides publishing tools and services. These groups are explicitly designed to be by and for the Global South. Their efforts are striving for self-determination and represent a collective fightback against global knowledge systems rooted in white canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 21 supremacy and are counter-structures to the commercialized journal oligopoly and efforts like Plan S (Aguado López and Becerril García 2019). Their approach is statebased, however, and it is not clear what level of decision-making and control lies directly with rank-and-file knowledge producers. African Journals Online, a nonprofit organization, was initiated by INASP, a who’s who of philanthro-capitalists. This organization increases access to African journals, but is entangled in many of the contradictions that we previously discussed. The Open Library of Humanities, a registered charity, also publishes without APCs and relies on library members for funding. It also has leaned heavily on philanthro-capitalist grants from the Mellon Foundation and Arcadia, which may push and pull it in certain directions and forms. ScholarLed’s member presses are worth paying attention to, especially as they continue work on the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM, see COPIM n.d.) project. The presses demonstrate a high-level of autonomy and some have been in existence for over a decade. Three of the presses are either charities or community interest corporations and, interestingly, meson press is a worker-cooperative. ScholarLed (ScholarLed n.d.), which Moore (2019) explored in his dissertation, is purposefully scaling small, which has the potential for more experimentalism and refusal of neoliberal pressures. The question of access to capital, without becoming subsumed to it, is a recurring challenge to autonomous, more radical organizations. For ScholarLed this means having to navigate the contradictions of working with philanthro-capitalist money in their COPIM project. The more state-based AmeliCA, unfortunately, always risks a reversal of progress depending on the will of future governments (and the imperial pressures on them). Conclusion Crisis narratives don’t always serve us, especially when they narrow our options down to fear, scarcity, and perpetual crisis. This is particularly true of the serials “crisis,” which happens in a university system where the major players frequently have a vested interest in competition, power, wealth, and hegemony, rather than a commitment to truth, justice, community, and knowledge sharing. Indeed, crisis is an engine of capitalism, or as Dario Gentili calls it, crisis is the art of government (2013). Crisis all too often becomes a process of furthering even deeper, more violent capitalism. As Alain Badiou (2014) says, “Capitalism is expanding everywhere around the world—it is doing wonderfully. Wars and crises are part of its means of development. These means are as brutal as they are necessary for wiping out the competition and allowing the winners to concentrate the greatest possible quantity of disposable capital in their own hands.” It comes as no surprise, then, that the serials crisis and the responses to it have resulted in higher concentrations of market share canadian journal of academic librarianship revue canadienne de bibliothéconomie universitaire 22 for the oligopoly and stronger collective imperialism. Reducing the crisis to one or two boogeymen is not only lazy. It’s also deceiving. While open access efforts and redistributing budgets give us the illusion of choice and action within the system, they do little to overcome the ultimate dictatorship of capital and the need to accumulate. More wealth is continually redistributed upwards than we are capable of redistributing horizontally. And as much as we may have the urge to reform, it is important to remember that the system isn’t broken, it was built this way. Exclusion, inequity, and privilege are at the heart of many academic systems. Hegemony, however, is never complete, and refusal of neoliberalism in our universities can help us escape our reformist tendencies. Refusal of the complete colonization of knowledge can help us recognize and cultivate alternatives, like the scholarly publishing projects in Latin America or more collectivist projects. We can find cracks in the hegemony, and nurture the projects that can grow in them. We need new barometers for judging whether our OA projects are successful. Has this improved Black people’s lives? Has this improved Indigenous people’s lives? Does it build power and/or lead towards liberation? The greater amounts of money being thrown at the unstable publishing system are a sign of both the capitalists’ continued commitment to it and its probable collapse. The misleadership class will defend it and prop it up for as long as possible, which often involves co-opting the detractors’ own language. The privileged academics, who enjoy being near the masters, have shown no solidarity and will be further weaponized against less fortunate workers. However, a system’s collapse does not guarantee a better replacement, and the time has never been more ripe for organizing. The system cannot hide its rottenness, especially as the contradictions keep expanding. There is only so much profit left to be squeezed from us. The majority of faculty are precariously employed, and their working conditions will increasingly resemble those of non-academic workers, potentially allowing them to see common cause. This creates more space to explore, adapt, and protagonistically deploy Rodney’s groundings methodology. Creating greater ideological independence from the ruling elite is an urgent task. We will only be free when the masses are conscious, organized, and accept nothing less than complete liberation. We should be prepared for this to be a decades-long struggle. 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