The university should be the place demonstrating socioecological change, serving as a site of experimentation and praxis (see Dunlap et al., 2023). This, however, could not be further from the truth. Beside advancing technologies of digital, political and military control (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), not to mention genetic dissection and animal vivisection—or some degree of this (Pellow, 2014)—universities fail to enact real examples of socioecological of renewability and sustainability. How come universities are not overflowing with agroecology, permaculture and forest gardens on and inside universities? How come universities are not self-generating their own electricity needs through wind, solar and other lower-carbon infrastructures? We, unfortunately, are witnessing the opposite at university campuses around the world.
If the research was conducted with public money, it should be freely accessible by the public, change my mind…
Some funding does actually require that, these days
Very cool. I know someone, in a fairly small but funded field, who had this sort of requirement — Elsevier had the relevant publication, but they couldn’t publish there due to access policies (or it was going to be painful to do so at any rate). So they started their own publication!
I forgot the specifics, but it essentially uses arXiv as the backend, and there’s a (commercially available?) frontend that lets editors and reviewers do their thing. “Publishing” in this journal is essentially just endorsing an arXiv paper; so it’s open access by design.
Really cool stuff. Their field is small enough that iirc they could kinda get critical mass to give Elsevier the finger and adopt this new platform. Warm fuzzy feeling thinking about it!
You forgot the part where this resulted in giving even more money to the publishers for the “Open access”. World is fucked.