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Facilitating ethical publishing (and degrowing academia) through collective action
The dominant system of academic publishing today is highly unethical: A few for-profit conglomerates control more than 50% of all articles in the natural sciences and social sciences, driving subscription and open-access publishing fees above levels that can be maintained by universities, libraries, and research institutions worldwide. These conglomerates are draining funds away from research, producing record profits for shareholders, and rewarding academics for hyper-competitive modes of thinking and acting. Additionally, most of these publishing conglomerates have been recently documented to have strong ties to deeply destructive industries - like the fossil fuel industry - which are contributing to ongoing climate and ecological breakdown. Ethical alternatives to the for-profit commercial publishing model exist, but how do we facilitate a transition towards them? In this talk, I explain the reasons why the move away from unethical publishing can be enabled by collective action. I also link the academic publishing problem with other problems in the academy, including artificial labour scarcity, the increasing control of workers' behaviours by a predatory managerial class, and a fixation on metrics, productivity and growth. All of these problems are linked and feed on each other. Through collective action - including community initiatives, protests, boycotts, and direct action - academics can organize to jointly "degrow" academia into a system that is radically more just, ethical and care-full, and that is more democratically administered by those who actually make it run.
