We are walking along Upper Woburn Place. A few minutes ago, Omri arrived at the lobby of Endsleigh Court where Tamar and Susan are staying. It’s a central street and the traffic is heavy. We wait impatiently at the crossing, feeling a sense of urgency. Although the day has just started, the writing retreat is too short, and we feel every minute is crucial. Turning right into Euston Road, we walk quickly towards the big red brick building of the British Library. Our plan for today is to talk less and write more, and the British Library seems like the best option. We can sit separately and write, but if we lose track or focus, we can sit together and find a way out of the muddle.

First, Omri and Susan need to subscribe to the library. To use the comfortable chairs in the reading rooms, one needs a reader card. It is relatively easy to get one, if you have two items of identification, one with proof of address. During the 1990s when the library was still located in the British Museum, you had also to prove that you are an academic or an independent scholar and that the British Library is the only place you can access the material needed for your research. Tamar remembers standing there, in front of a serious clerk, holding a letter from Tel Aviv University where she was a PhD student, waiting to give a speech she had prepared in advance, demonstrating her urgent need of library services. Her confidence evaporated when the administrator asked her coldly and condescendingly whether she cannot find the same material in one of the university’s libraries. Instead of insisting that she is entitled to the library’s treasures, she mumbled apologetically that she didn’t really know since as an Israeli academic these libraries are also closed to her; therefore it would be really helpful and she would be very thankful if he could issue her a reader card. “Please sir, please,” she almost begged. Luckily, she was found eligible for the library services and could join the other privileged readers.

We stand in line. There is always a queue to enter the library. Despite online access to books and articles, to be in the actual place and hold real books and documents seems to attract scholars and laymen/women alike. Next, we stand in another queue, this time for the subscription. Having to negotiate with an impatient clerk, we eventually receive the cards, and head to the chosen reading room—Humanities 1. Outside the reading rooms we notice many people, mostly young adults, who sit very close to each other sharing narrow spaces. Can they get reading cards? Maybe because we are professional academics, we are oblivious to the existing obstacles and the selection process. But perhaps these young people are just not interested in crossing the reading rooms’ gatekeepers since they have their own ways of accessing information.

Earlier on we decided that we are going to dedicate this day to writing about open access, a subject Susan brought up when we worked on the book proposal. In one of our online meetings, she appeared quite excited. Apparently after watching the documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, she became convinced that if used properly, open access publishing could become a dissenting method challenging restriction on knowledge distribution posed by neoliberal academia. Yet discussing the issue further, we realized we would have to address some complications, for example the fact that academic corporations are those who own most of the open access publishers; or the meaning of making our intellectual property freely available; or freedom of access to whom—to our work partners, members of our local community, worldwide audiences?

Now in the British Library before entering the reading room and finding our own chairs, we sit down in the café discussing and clarifying our current writing plans. Susan wants to tell us why open access publishing is in her mind linked to her success or failure as a social work academic.

Susan’s Story: Knowledge Kept in the Shadows

I have recently completed collaborative research looking at how grandparents can better maintain relationships with grandchildren after child protection concerns, she reminds us, and I have six grandchildren so the topic is quite close to my heart. After undertaking a literature review, it was clear to me this was an under-researched topic. The research partners were three small, non-government organizations who support families after child protection intervention. What the partner organizations wanted from the study was for child protection workers to be more inclusive of grandparents, to see them as a critical lynchpin who can hold things together in the family and help maintain children’s wellbeing, identity and culture, or who can help in decision-making when out-of-home care is needed for a child.

Findings identified that some grandparents had been caring for their grandchildren due to adult parents’ mental health issues, homelessness, drug use or incarceration, or when the parents were unable or unwilling to care for their children. These children often were returned to parents over time, but relationships between the grandparents and adult parents commonly became strained. Even relationships with their grandchildren could become unexpectedly fragile if adult parents separated, divorced or remarried, if there was conflict in the family or if adult parents discovered it was the grandparents who had reported the neglect of the children to child protection services. For example in the pilot study, one grandmother explained that her daughter “was working in a brothel and taking the children with her … so I went to the Department of Child Protection. … [Afterwards] I was treated like the evil grandmother. There was absolutely no contact” (Gair, 2017). Grandparents were adamant that the decision-making by child protection staff was ill-informed, not in the best interests of children, and not in line with their own policies and procedures. Grandparents wanted their voice and stories to be heard.

Towards the end of the project, we had co-written several manuscripts with the partner organizations making clear recommendations for changes to child protection practice. After notification of our first publication in the international journal Child and Family Social Work I sent a rejoicing email to our partners—with a link to the online journal. In response, one of the partners promptly replied that they were happy for me that the article was published but they could not access it online because they did not have a paid subscription to the journal and could not afford to take out a subscription. I was embarrassed at my university-centric naivety regarding available access to professional journals, but I was suddenly struck by the huge implications of this single statement.

In that moment I realized that most Australian government and non-government child protection services, workers, policy makers and support staff would not see our article detailing the research findings, and would not read the recommendations made, unless they had a paid-up subscription to each specific journal where our publications appeared. It was a shocking realization of the professional gulf between the academy and professional social work practice—a gulf I had previously argued was quite minimal. Seen by some as the great divide between the “ivory tower” and professional practice, I had made the case to my students that theories and research were just different facets of practice. I agreed with others that in these times of widened university participation, the ivory tower did not really exist anymore despite the common perception. But I had ignored the vital prerequisite of accessibility. Of course, I immediately emailed the three partners a copy of the article, but the wider injustice was not so easily remedied.

How could social work practice ever be the “evidence-informed practice” I was teaching about if highly relevant research findings could not be accessed by workers and policy makers? How could this huge gulf have escaped my full awareness? I shared this exchange between myself and our research partner with colleagues, but few of them reflected back to me the shocked realization that I was feeling. Perhaps they thought I was very naïve to think the reality was anything different.

The following week I was invited by our librarian to attend the local screening of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, a movie. As I watched the documentary, I again felt the growing shame—I had been such an uncritical participant in this whole neoliberal market-driven business of publishing. Basically, the documentary laid bare the closed, insular business model of publishers and how access to academic publications is an invisible privilege basically only open to academics and students while they are studying but closed to anyone else. This screening at my university appeared to be somewhat of an act of insubordination by the unassuming university library staff, spotlighting a growing issue of knowledge inequity that most academics seemed oblivious to. Nevertheless, when I tried subsequently to build an alliance with them focused on how we might start to address this problem, it did not really gain any traction. Perhaps after raising it, they believed it was up to others to challenge the status quo. What I have realized is that publicly funded research being generated in public universities for the betterment of the community is getting lost in translation and is not being used to benefit the community. It seems obvious—we need to open up access to knowledge that is generated in the academy.

“Open access” in this context most often refers to free access in the public domain which is said to have proliferated after initiatives such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in 2003. Several journals across a range of disciplines allow free open access, making scholarly research available to a wider audience. However, some of these publishers may restrict access, for example through early online release only, delayed access or sample articles only. Closed, subscription-based journals still dominate, where charges apply for open access (e.g. gold access; bronze access). Charges can sometimes be devolved to funding bodies (if you have any funding) or to individual authors or readers (Siler, 2017). University archiving in e-repositories increasingly is permitted (Green access) by journals for pre-print versions only, otherwise charges or embargo periods apply.

To enable unlimited access to closed journals, journal subscriptions are purchased by universities. These costs have risen sharply in recent years. Such subscription fees and open access fees seem to have been accepted as legitimate given a journal’s reputation in the academic marketplace. Smaller journals have sought to join with more prestigious publishers to gain increased legitimacy, accepting that associated increased fees and decreased access were inevitable, even desirable. Yet many universities producing research are publicly funded institutions—fees have already been paid through public funding for their ongoing operation, salaries and research.

Some say progress towards open access is steadily advancing. Academics are familiar with social networks and platforms that more recently have helped disseminate research findings, such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. These platforms often host copies of full texts with agreement from authors who are breaching publisher contracts. But again, how often are these platforms accessed by the public, or by health and welfare practitioners in their everyday practice? I have heard reports that institutional resistance emerging internationally against high-profile publishers’ subscription and access costs is growing. For example Harvard University previously had highlighted the untenable situation of unsustainable journal costs and encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals, and to reconsider publishing in journals that keep articles behind paywalls. Meanwhile institutions in Sweden, Germany and Norway reportedly are not renewing subscriptions to Elsevier from 2019 (Qureshi, 2019; Sample, 2012).

Publishers behind paywalls were quick to observe the growing underground open access movement and accelerated journal offerings as the internet became more widely accessible. A parallel movement sought to discredit emerging open access journals. Many smaller or lesser-known journals subsequently began to be identified as being of disputable origins (and perhaps some were); a situation where questionable authors published questionable findings in dubious publications. Journal names began to appear on circulated lists of “predatory” or “rogue” publications. Academics were told that publications in these journals would not be “counted.” Open access journals and rogue journals were understood by some people to be one and the same. I do not remember hearing any of my colleagues questioning “who were the rogues” in academic publishing. Academic institutions advised that only well-recognized publishers could be trusted with our research manuscripts and paying large fees for open access was acceptable and desirable if you could afford it, to increase readership of your work.

After weathering years of highs and lows in the academy, my focus had not been on the ethics of publishing in closed journals. This deeper pondering only occurred after those two above-mentioned key events jolted me enough to reconsider “closed access” as a social justice issue. Scholarship disseminated only through the restricted scholarly marketplace of subscription journals seems to be the antithesis of social justice. Instead of providing public access to information for the greater human good, scholarly publications exist in a tightly controlled, closed system, where the findings of important, taxpayer-funded research are published in subscription-only journals and additional public funding is required (university library subscriptions) for the academic community and students to access the research findings. Still more money is required for open access. As identified by Scherlen and Robinson (2008), and more recently by authors such as Arunachalam (2017), what seems to have escaped academics’ attention, even as they write about social justice issues, are ethics and equity concerns associated with open and closed publishing.

More recently, I had been wondering whether I should pay the expensive open access fees being demanded by high-profile publishers from my own wages to increase distribution of my publications. There has been increasing unsolicited lobbying of authors to pay open access fees to make their work more widely available. I wanted my work to be read but I saw it as succumbing to what I believed were unreasonable pressures to come up with the funds myself. It is not like academic authors are paid for their authored work. They are the unpaid labourers in the business of publishing, but the product of their labour is sold many times over. Yes, it is a marketplace, I know, and a market is about supply and demand. But this is a distorted marketplace because the product—scholarly research findings, critique and produced knowledge—is not linked to consumers who would benefit, that is the public; rather the supply is only linked to other producers.

So why don’t we challenge and change the system? One reason, as we discussed in the previous chapter, is the controlling power of metrics. Within the university, metrics are commonly used to inform academic workload calculations, in decision-making for awarding internal grants and conference funding, and in ascertaining academic promotion eligibility. As Tamar and Omri inferred earlier managers seek specific metrics that demonstrate the worth of a piece of research, and in turn the worth of the researcher, as reflected in the impact factor of the journal that accepted the manuscript, and their readership and H-Index. The status of a university is mirrored in its high-profile, highly published researchers.

As pointed out by Scherlen and Robinson (2008) and Lincoln (2018), while the advent of the internet has facilitated potentially limitless knowledge-sharing pathways, conversely it has contributed to the privatization of public knowledge. Then again others argue that academic knowledge has never been freely available to the public. But does that justify continuation of an academic closed shop in this booming internet era of unlimited information sharing? Siler (2017) reported that academic publishing is an industry worth US $10 billion per annum and rising. Frankly, the whole business of publishing in the last decade points to publishers, universities and academics behaving badly.

At some point, as academics we have become highly self-focused on what is needed to survive in the academy. We seem to have forgotten why we are there—to grow public knowledge and contribute to public good through research and education. Denzin and Giardina (2018, p. 2) pinpoint the essence of the problem when they reflected that with academics’ preoccupation in the “very real war of survival” in universities, are we becoming “lost among the forest and missing the trees which stand in front of us”? We have become desensitized to the mounting pressures and demands of the academy while remaining beguiled by the available, competitive (reducing) rewards including tenure, internal research funding, sabbaticals, funded conference attendance, promotion and being eligible to supervise higher degree research students. I have been espousing the need for evidence-based practice in social work to students for years but have been blinded to the reality of the gulf between research and practice that I have contributed to by publishing behind the paywall.

But to be fair, let’s widen our gaze. Barner et al. (2015) identified that academics in the current “publish more, publish now” environment desperately seek to undertake research and produce multiple publications from the same study findings (named as “salami slicing” by one publisher I know) just to survive, preferably publishing in high impact factor journals. Without trying to shirk accountability for being self-focused, neoliberalism needs to be unmasked in this “market economy game” of academic publishing. Academics live with uncertainty, ever-increasing teaching, administration and service loads, and prescribed publishing just to demonstrate their worth. And neoliberalism is much more than just a market economy discourse. It is more like a Trojan horse seemingly releasing barriers to be methodically leapt over, or like an unseen virus that has infected academic life by stealth.

Ironically, there is mounting pressure for university researchers at my university, and presumably elsewhere in the world, to build research partnerships with communities so research engagement and impact can be demonstrated and measured. With a passing glance this engagement and impact agenda looks like a timely intervention and a win-win for all involved. Through university/community collaborations research and scholarship can be translated into policy and practice for real-world impact. But how can impact happen if practitioners, organizations, policymakers and the public cannot access this scholarly work because it is behind the paywalls, hidden and inaccessible?

The reality is clearer to me now. Scholarship through traditional subscription journals behind paywalls reinforces exclusion and elitism and renders the latest university engagement and impact crusade as little more than rhetoric. And the bottom line for me is that in my discipline the core values are social justice, integrity and equity. Yet as a social work academic I am ashamed to admit I have become enslaved by the academy to the detriment of my own profession and its core values. I have listened to warnings against finding a home for my publications in free open access journals, instead seeing subscription journals as the safer, more beneficial harbour, and I have conveyed this accepted wisdom to my postgraduate students until recently.

But why have I and other academics unquestionably gone along with the rhetoric of the “prestige behind the paywall” as compared to the “dangerousness” of free open access? What perverse situation have we found ourselves in when in abiding by these prescribed publishing rules our research work is barely read, it cannot contribute to informed practice in our disciplines, it does not contribute to any public good and it hardly contributes to our required citations count unless more money is paid? And I ask you, is it possible to strive, survive, publish and also be activist against the system all at the same time? Yes, I answer, because that is what academic scholarship is: research, critique and recommendations for a fairer world. By complying, we continue to silence our own voices.

As Allen (2018, p. 40) admits, “currently, publication in most open access journals does not receive the academic credit that is afforded more longstanding and traditional journals.” But the problem is so much bigger. Have publishers acted with transparency and integrity as custodians of our intellectual property or have they kept it locked in the shadows? Have academics acted with integrity? What if we provoke a radical transformation? We can resist publishing predominantly behind paywalls, encourage our institutions to stop subscribing to expensive journals, support credible open access journals and call for appropriate academic credit from our Heads of Departments for legitimate open access publications? We would be standing up for the common good, social justice, equity and shared knowledge, and rejecting narrowly prescribed, “legitimised” closed access publishing.

Susan’s activist call is a breath of fresh air. But is it enough to replace high-ranking closed access journals with free open access venues to attain social justice? Tamar is occupied with this question but although she sits next to Susan and Omri in the reading room, she resists disturbing them. They both seem so absorbed in writing. The public availability of our research, she wants to tell them, won’t bring the called-for “revolution.” As academic scholars we must first gain public faith by traversing the gulf we have created between them and us while climbing further up the ladder of the ivory tower. Currently most people see academic knowledge as incomprehensible and irrelevant to their everyday existence. To renew their trust, we should change the way we write. We need to give up academic jargon understood only by few and stop producing multiple publications from the same study findings which add to nothing. If we become more intelligible and produce more meaningful articles, we will obtain public credibility and thus the accessibility of our work would have an effect.

But Tamar’s speech must wait for later. Omri is busy exploring the challenges of accessibility from a different angle. In the cafeteria a few hours earlier he said that after years of confronting what seemed to him to be the reinforced “dictatorship” of English within the neoliberal academia, his piece addresses the difficulties of academics whose native tongue is not English, and so is their audiences. “We are required to publish exclusively in English,” he said, “and those who were born and raised outside Anglophone cultures like myself and Tamar, are destined either to lose their local and sometimes immediate audience in the process, or if choosing to write in our own language, risk being regarded as disqualified or incompetent by the academic community.” Susan said that she was not aware until now how privileged she was as an English speaker in the academic maze. Now in the reading room, Omri writes fast and freely in his native language.

Omri’s Story: Lost in Translation

My mother tongue is Hebrew. Even though I picked up some German words from my parents, who used the language when they didn’t want me to understand them, and although I studied English from the third year in primary school like most Israeli children and later Arabic in high school, Hebrew is my first language. I write in it, speak it, it mediates my thoughts. Stories I write for this book too, I’m writing in Hebrew. It’s easier and faster, and mainly it allows me to be more precise in what I say: the intermediate spaces between the words, the various shadings of the language, are intimately familiar to me. They are my playground, and I know every piece of playground equipment—its tiers and curvature, its colours and the experience it can provide.

Afterwards I will give the story that I’m writing now to Diana Rubanenko, a translator whom I regularly work with, to translate into English. Sometimes I write directly in English—these are cases in which the aesthetic of the text is less crucial to me, where its musicality or tone is marginal; usually these are articles to which I am less attached. I will ask Diana to edit them for me. In either case, I then read the translated or edited text and correct things that seem to me aberrant, and sometimes even reconstruct sentences on a faltering intuition, trying to capture the music of the English language as I know it—in the same way that an immigrant comes to know the new country in the course of time, but at the same time always stumbles into unfamiliar corners.

The reason why I linger over the way in which this text is being written is because this kind of longwinded writing procedure (writing, translation, corrections, linguistic proofreading) is the lot of many academics who are not native English-speakers. It includes a dialogue between at least two people: one who specializes in the content of and is a signatory to the article; while the other receives payment for giving it English resonance, but usually remains in the shadows upon publication.

As is well known, English is the language of the international academic community. Three hundred and eighty million people, slightly less than 5% of the world’s population, speak it as their mother tongue, but 1.75 billion people speak it as their second or third language (Neeley, 2012). English is an international language, the language of globalization—not only in the academic field, of course, but also in the music, film and food industries, in business and politics; in short, every field that touches upon the economic centre of the West.

English is the global academic language due to historical processes that it is unnecessary to specify here, unless I should wish to use such terms as the eurocentrism of the canon of knowledge or intellectual colonialism. My daily research work doesn’t deal with them. It entails publishing in English, as I belong to an international community; I want to read and be read by my professional colleagues and fellow scholars, students and the general public. English serves as a common denominator for intellectual endeavours around the world, a bridge connecting scholars, researchers and ideas.

But as in any case of a global economy, there is a price to be paid. It must be paid when the global power becomes more and more dominant, when it becomes a monopoly in its field. Global forces restrict the possibilities open to local producers. This is true regarding how McDonald’s disseminates the hamburger culture at the expense of local foods; it’s also true regarding Taylor Swift’s hits which top the charts everywhere in the world, or Marvel’s blockbuster films. The free global exchange of such goods makes the world a smaller place, for better or worse, as it allows the free movement of intercultural exchanges, mainly of the periphery towards the centre (but less in the opposite direction). So too with academia: ideas cross borders by means of the English language. Edward Said (1990) calls this “worldliness.” He writes that the philosophical home is not the writer or the nation, but the world. However, this academic “world” is available to us primarily in English.

Globalization, including that of the academic industries, creates a distinctive hierarchy between powerful and widely distributed goods, which belong to the cultural centre and use it as a reference point, and local goods whose translation into the global economy is difficult and sometimes even impossible (Huggan, 2001, p. 4). They belong to and address a place, a specific landscape—human or geographical.

I talked over these ideas with Tamar, who told me that she had once participated in a conference where the keynote speaker, a Brazilian woman, demonstrated that while she was constantly required to explain her culture, the British and North American scholars were exempt from this obligation. But someone like myself, who finds himself listening or reading American or British papers, occasionally doesn’t understand cultural or historical nuances that are presented as self-evident. My task—as someone who belongs to the periphery of the English highway—is to understand the people of the cultural centre; it is not their duty to explain. That’s the privilege of the global centre.

Sometimes my belonging to the international academic community is put to a test. Like any academic, I’m not always completely satisfied with every article I publish. Some of the articles were written for exploiting loose ends, scraps of thought or papers delivered at academic conferences (“I really should do something about them”). Yes, there are those too. After all, within the neoliberal academic publishing economy, every resource must be efficiently utilized; every investment must reap its reward, for otherwise it’s a waste of time, otherwise we’re not doing what we’re supposed to do.

(Not all my colleagues would agree with me on this point. Some of them believe that everything they write is original and enthralling, the purest gold. I know them; they abound in the academic landscape, behave as if they own it. And indeed, they are usually the most efficient producers; they tend not to doubt themselves. But I tend to doubt them, because I function in the same system as them, and I am subject to the same constraints. I suspect that they have internalized the rules of the discourse and the academic habitus in such a way that they now find it difficult to distinguish between the essential and the trivial.)

However, there are also articles that I’m proud of, to which I’ve devoted much thought and attention. They contain an original thought that I believe is of significance in my research field. To be honest, they are not the majority of my academic writings, but they’re there, dear to my heart.

I published one of those articles in Hebrew. It was commissioned from me as part of a project on visual culture in Israel, the country where I was born and whose culture I study and critique. It was about the concept of bodily beauty in Israel. My claims don’t really matter here, yet I will briefly relate to them, because it’s one of the articles I love, that I’m proud of.

Beauty is always a politically charged concept; it’s a resource that some have and others are deprived of, due to historical, political and ideological reasons. And this is especially true regarding Israeli culture, which has grown out of Jewish immigrants of different skin complexions and features who came from across the world. Throughout modern history “Jewish” features were represented as a sight of corporeal ugliness. Under newfound sovereignty, this perception has been changing. Yet, which features would be considered beautiful, and why? Which criteria does a culture use to formulate for itself the implicit distinctions regarding beauty?

I wrote the article in Hebrew, because all the primary sources were in Hebrew. I analysed contexts of fashion, Israeli beauty pageants and local television programmes featuring aesthetic makeovers. I was pleased with the option of publishing it in Hebrew because I wanted Israeli students to be able to read it without any mediation or linguistic obstacles; I wanted to critique my own culture in its language and with its tools, and to spark an internal cultural discussion regarding its politics, its covert and overt racism, mediated through the sly, ostensibly neutral concepts of beauty or aesthetics. In essence this is mostly an internal conversation; it won’t interest Belgian, Indian or Australian students or scholars to the same degree. I wrote the article in adherence to the local codes and the possibility of the deeper interpretation that is enabled by presenting them to an audience that is intimately familiar with them, as a self-evident phenomenon in their lives. It was published in an anthology titled Visual Cultures in Israel.

A few months later the time came for the yearly evaluation of my academic performance. Like any scholar working at an academic institution, I am required to report on progress in my research to the authorities. I am assessed on the basis of this report, which determines my future research budgets and sometimes, if it was a good year, grants me a lighter teaching load. After about a month, I received the results of the evaluation. I had been awarded no points for that article.

I wondered why. It was a good academic article in my field (something I can’t say about all my articles, even not about those which I’ve published in eminent journals in English). It was quite evident that nobody on the evaluation committee had read it. The appraisal and ranking of academic products in the humanities is not based on their content but rather on the statistical metrics which determines the journal reputation. As regards journals in Hebrew, the situation is complicated: articles in languages other than English are from the outset considered academically inferior, regardless of their content. In Israel, evaluation committees rarely award points to local academic journals, unless the evaluator has a special interest in the journal or has published an article in it himself. Although there is a list of journals in Hebrew that are considered academic, institutions tend to ignore it. My article wasn’t included in the conversation being held by the international community of knowledge, and therefore was of no significance.

Over the course of my academic career, my colleagues had repeatedly told not to waste my time and energy on writing in Hebrew: it is insignificant in the evaluation of performance, irrelevant to my calling-card as an academic. I wasn’t surprised by the score, zero points, but this time it made me angry; perhaps it was a matter of simple pride, because I hoped that someone would read, respond to and appreciate an article that was so dear to me. Maybe it was a rebellious response to the obscure criteria for the evaluation of articles in a language other than English, which are not assessed by international measures and therefore cannot be assessed transparently or contextually.

And perhaps it was something deeper and more ideological, related to the widening gap between the concepts of “academic” and “public intellectual” in spaces that aren’t English-speaking. Here, in the space in which I find myself, you are forbidden to directly address the community that surrounds you, and which you are studying, in its own language, which is your language too. It’s a “waste of time” to write for this public; you must write for your academic colleagues, even if only a few of them read what you write, even if the true resonance of what you’re trying to say is to be found elsewhere, not in the academic journals which are behind the paywall and only for English-speakers.

I was upset because I felt I’d been punished for momentary deviation from the measurement efficiency of neoliberal academia, manifested by the regime of international impact. Because I was upset, I wrote a letter to the committee responsible for rating the performance evaluations. One cannot begin such a letter with the matter itself. I first had to explain that I wasn’t objecting to the need for and significance of participation in the international scholarly community, and that I understood the necessity of writing in English. I had to begin with this self-evident comment in order to clear myself of any suspicion; for otherwise it would be easy to wield immediate demagogic tools against me, to scold and lecture me on the importance of peer discourse and participation in international platforms (I’ve noticed that the more provincial the academic community is, the greater the importance it ascribes to internationalism).

Only after these opening remarks did I turn to the matter at hand, which relates to four grounds for publications in the local language (again, I emphasized, not as a replacement, but only as a supplement in relevant cases). They’re quite simple. First, the exclusivity of the English language in countries which aren’t English-speaking turns academia into an ivory tower. The local general audience has little access to intellectual materials in English. It’s an ivory tower, because a foreign audience of academic scholars has greater access to any article than its direct target audience, with whom it deals and to whom it’s relevant. Second, the exclusivity of English in academic writing—especially when dealing with the local culture or society—is an instrument in the service of inequity within the local academia. Fluency in English has to do with economic, geographical and ethnic variables. In Israel, for example, not everyone enjoys a high level of education: it depends on where your parents came from, whether you grew up in the centre or the periphery, and the economic status of your family. When students who are studying Israeli culture, for example, only encounter articles in English about their own culture the inequality is reproduced, regardless of students’ academic competence. The inequality problem is exacerbated in the case of minority students, for whom English is their third language. For example Arab students in Israel suffer more than Jewish students from the designation of English as the first academic language. They are required to pass exams in Hebrew, their second language, when they enter academia (where their further studies will also be conducted in Hebrew), but they must read all the learning materials in English, a third language, with a different alphabet from the first two languages.

The third ground is slightly disconcerting, because it involves technical aspects of translation. When academic scholars, mainly in the humanities and social sciences, write in English about their local culture, they are forced to invent an English jargon in order to translate local concepts. In translation, the original meaning of concepts migrates to nearby but not identical fields of meaning. It’s absurd that Israeli students often join together to translate articles from English to Hebrew—in order to facilitate learning for an exam, or to use the article as a source in writing an assignment. They may hire the services of a translator and split the cost, and he will render the English concept back into Hebrew—in a way that distorts the original meaning, sometimes in a quite comical fashion.

An obvious counterargument is that the students must practice reading English. That’s true. But it’s detached from reality to believe that convenient access to articles in Hebrew will prevent them from reading other materials in English. Better to be open-eyed and not purist: every academic in Israel, whether student or lecturer, is familiar with the shady industry of quick and shoddy academic translations from English to Hebrew, especially in undergraduate studies (mea culpa: I too engaged in it during my first year at university). This industry has a hugely detrimental effect on the students’ quality of learning, and even more so their comprehension: the students learn local content through filtered translations. What reason is there to participate in a farcical pageant, in which faculty and students all pretend that English articles are read without mediation, and to abet the distortion of scholarly materials—especially regarding those who study and research the local culture, language, history or literature?

The fourth ground is cultural. Academia in Israel, as in other countries (though perhaps more intensely), conducts itself like a Middle Eastern branch of an American (or Anglophone) colony, and that conduct stands in strange contrast to the linguistic patriotism in Israel. There are other countries, such as Denmark or the Netherlands, in which the policy regarding the evaluation of articles in the local language is more reasonable. They don’t regard with parochial suspicion research that deals with the local culture and is published in its language. A certain share of research in the local language is necessary for public intellectual activity. It is essential in order to inform a well anchored public debate that avoids catchy slogans, fake news and clichés, and to influence policy and cultural and social discursive practices. The vacuum formed due to the absence of research in the public discourse is rapidly filled: by PR people, by opinion-makers, by politicians, by a fast and easy to digest culture that provides simple answers to complicated questions—or in other words, by everything that stands opposed to the goals of academia and its public role. Am I naïve to believe that the train hasn’t yet left the station?

The letter I sent was ineffectual, of course, at least regarding whoever read it. The laconic response I received conveyed to me the gestures that must have accompanied the reading of the letter: the hand wiping the brow, the rolling of the eyes. It read as follows: “We have carefully read the appeal you submitted. To our regret, there was nothing wrong with the evaluation process. We wish to remind you that publications in English are necessary for participating in and communicating with the international community of scholars in your field.”

The problem doesn’t concern the specific professor responsible for the assessment apparatus at the academic institution in which I work. It’s related to the cooperation with neoliberal habits of regularizing and measuring output, and even more so to the absence of a broader discourse or policy in peripheral countries that are not English-speaking, that is in most of the world. The discourse must define a policy regarding the weight of writing in the local language in the evaluation of a scholar, and even—if I may go a step further—requiring scholars to publish also in their local language, to a certain extent and when the topics are relevant, as part of their public responsibility. For this it would be necessary to devise a ranking system for academic journals in local languages, one that also takes into account minorities and migrants, and allows in parallel the appraisal and measurement of their quality.

After all, the humanities and certain fields in the social sciences specialize in the critique of globalization processes and study their effects on the depletion of local resources. The critique is written in English, and it’s published in American journals or British-global academic presses. Even this story, as I noted at the outset, is being translated into English in order to be published by Palgrave Macmillan; its content may not change in translation, but its impact certainly will.

That’s the trap I find myself in now, together with some of my colleagues who agree in principle and are concerned with what I have suggested here. This text will be published in a global academic framework, instead of in Hebrew. But without this distancing translation I would not have the resources to continue taking action. I would have fewer resources that allow me to say these things in my local language too. The global neoliberal system has trapped me inside it, is colouring my critical opposition in unpleasant shades of hypocrisy and forcing me to cooperate—at least for the time being; at least for as long as I shall be awarded zero points for my most meaningful articles, in Hebrew.

At lunch Tamar says that she keeps thinking about Omri’s frustration regarding the neoliberal trap. For an hour she sat in front of the computer staring at the empty screen. She wondered what her contribution to this ongoing discussion about open access would be. In fact, as an Israeli she feels similar linguistic obstacles. However, researching the nuclear debate, and currently Victorian working-class women, there are no publishing venues for her in Hebrew. “And this shows how parochial the Israeli academy is,” Tamar complains. “When I told colleagues that I research mothers who committed infanticide in Victorian Britain, many of them wondered why I don’t research Israeli mothers who committed the same crime.”

People around us are enjoying the lunch break. Some are sitting on the balcony appreciating the blue sky and the sun. For a while we eat in silence. Tamar recounts that for years she came to the British Library to do research for her book about two mothers who killed their children, which was published in Hebrew. For some time, people have urged her to make it accessible to the international community by publishing it in English as well. So maybe she is interested in the issue brought up by Omri but from reverse—in the neoliberal academia what are the obstacles for making your writing available to the wider, more international audience when living in what is regarded as a geographical and cultural periphery or margins?

Tamar’s Story: “You will have a marketing problem”

“Have you translated the book into English yet?” a friend asked me after I had lectured on Malice Aforethought, a research-novel that had been published in 2012. The book focuses on two mothers who murdered their children in nineteenth-century England and two contemporary researchers who are trying, not always successfully, to tell their stories. The book had been published in Hebrew by Dvir, a commercial publisher. In the eyes of my academic friends and colleagues I made two wrong decisions: I wrote and published in Hebrew and therefore I confined myself to a restricted local marginal audience and rather than choosing an academic publisher I selected a commercial one, thus withholding it from the academic significance it deserves. Translating it into English was therefore regarded by my professional community as mandatory. “It’s on the way,” I said in embarrassment, thinking about how slowly the translation was going and how I wasn’t doing anything to speed it up, and even wondering whether there was a place for it at all on the bookshelves in English-speaking countries. “You really have to publish it. You must. It’s about England but it’s also really innovative.” I smiled. Yes, it was written as an “inter-genre,” and there were not many like it in Israel or anywhere else.

One of the reasons, I suspected, was that neither academic nor commercial publishers tended to take on works that did not belong to any clear genre. So those who wanted to publish their work, justifiably did not even consider such an adventure. “You will have a marketing problem,” said my PhD dissertation supervisor, when I told him over coffee about the book I was writing. “They won’t know where to put it on the shelf.” He smiled but I could sense the implied warning of a future muddle. He, who had published several books, knew the book market better than I did. He was right. The librarian of the college where I teach called me to ask whether it should be classified as fiction or as an academic text. And if it was academic, what was the right disciplinary label: gender studies, motherhood, criminology or legal studies. I was not sure either. “Maybe the best is two copies” I mumbled, “one in the fiction section and the other in the motherhood subdivision?” In bookstores they were perplexed as well. Some stocked it on the literature shelves while others classified it as research.

So, because of the unwelcoming confusion among publishers, bookshops and libraries in confronting my book—which, at first, I had experienced as a sense of power and pride—I was challenging the system—I gradually lost my confidence in its significance. They must have succeeded in convincing me that there was no place for it in the appropriate publishing space, because it was not exactly academic and not exactly literary; it was not exactly history and not exactly fiction. Nevertheless, everyone who read the book asked me if I had already translated it and whether I had applied to a publisher.

A few days after this conversation, a friend who had been present at the lecture forcefully declared that I had to have an academic publisher. “Don’t compromise,” she said assertively, “You need a good university publisher, like Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard University Press. Start at the top, and if they don’t accept it, go down to B ranking, you know, Bloomsbury, Ashgate. Those are also good. But under no circumstances should you go to a commercial press without peer review. That would mean that it won’t be listed in your CV, and you need it in order to become a full professor.”

That made me think about her concealed assumptions. She valued the book; she thought that it contained important academic knowledge and she considered that it warranted the highest regard, as she saw it. She assumed that I, like her, wanted to achieve the highest academic rank. She was not completely wrong since up to now I had climbed the academic ladder slowly but surely. I wanted to discuss these basic assumptions with her, but I didn’t. I only responded, “Do you think so?” “Yes!” she replied. So now a few months later sitting here in the British Library, during a writing retreat, and composing part of my chapter on open access and the neoliberal academia, I want to challenge some of her suppositions and present some questions.

Assuming that one of the A-ranking academic presses will agree to publish a book like mine that challenges the established distinction between academic and non-academic discourse, and tells in large part fictional stories, maintaining that these tales are legitimate history, will my book and I benefit from that, as my friend had promised? I will have an impressive listing on my CV, but who will read my book? It will be sold with a hard binding (because most of these publishers issue only a few hardcover copies) and will be overpriced. It will be bought only by university libraries and I doubt whether anyone will ever take it off the shelf. Even if there are people who want to read the book because somehow they have heard about it—although university publishers never do anything to advance sales since their books are only meant for a limited audience—they will not be able to afford the exaggerated price (often $150 dollars per copy). Lending from university libraries or even entering them is barred to those who are not students or lecturers. In other words, my book will be buried on the shelves in universities’ reading rooms (following a long discussion regarding the proper section). And this is the best-case scenario since there is always a chance that university libraries, with their limited budgets, will not consider purchasing it at all.

I remember a friend who published a book about theatre history with a respected university publisher in the United States, complaining that no one reads her book. Why should they read it; it was expensive and inaccessible, I wanted to say yet didn’t. Instead we discussed the unbearable indifference of potential readers, like many academics, while avoiding the need to challenge the problematic platform of high prestigious academic presses.

So, what is preferable—a listing on my CV or at least a fair reading public? That’s an interesting question since it means that academics condemn themselves in advance to the margins of public discourse if they want to get ahead within the guild, just as my friend had clarified in her short speech regarding the right venue for Malice Aforethought. Usually, when they/we reach the top of the academic ladder and become full professors, they/we allow them/ourselves to leave the golden cage and go out to the masses. Then we send our books to commercial publishers and write articles in newspapers. But perhaps this should be challenged. Maybe I should refuse to do what is considered appropriate and correct to advance my academic career and try to have my book published by a commercial publisher (although these publishers, as well, are not enthusiastic about publishing an inter-genre book).

And if I have already begun to challenge academic publishing, here is another question: in this neoliberal milieu, aren’t the university publishers actually commercial profit-making businesses like any other, and does the intellectual purity we attribute to them because they engage in peer review really make them unbiased? I suspect that in our capitalistic world, it is almost impossible to escape commercial considerations. These considerations frequently determine reductions in the number of words and pages, even among respected academic presses (the contracts we sign include the numbers of words or pages we are expected to produce), and that dictates the nature and evolvement of our intellectual venture. I presume that what distinguishes between university and non-university presses is perhaps their intellectual prestige and their distinct location within the book market matrix. Maybe those publishers, whom my friend termed “the top,” are simply those that the academic establishment has delegated as its own, and this positioning inevitably awards them an aura of high quality and seriousness.

And now that I think of it, perhaps, because they enable us to gain a respected listing on our CVs and grant us the platform for institutional importance, they allow themselves not only to demand changes in the way we write and in our arguments, but they also appropriate our texts. For example they retain all rights to our work forever, and they give us, the authors, only a small number of copies. We never struggle against these draconian rules because we desperately want that listing on our CVs which will improve our chances to advance professionally and to gain institutional approbation. But this is not described as interference with professional considerations because we receive respectability in return, and so maybe we care less that the publishers prevent us by legal and economic procedures to make our knowledge accessible to the public.

I raise my head from the computer screen looking at a fellow researcher at the opposite desk who was leafing impatiently through a book and then started typing hurriedly. He is probably worried about his own output today. In the neoliberal academia, output counts. We have to be efficient and fast, but our products, as Omri already related, should find their way to the right publishing venues. Otherwise it is a fruitless effort.

Early this morning before going to the library with Omri and Susan for another day of work, I checked my email server, discovering a letter from Adam Rummens, the Commission Editor of Cambridge Scholar Publishing. I read his personal email while drinking coffee: “We would be pleased if you would consider submitting a proposal to publish a book or an edited collection,” he wrote acknowledging my scholarly potential by mentioning one of my articles. Reading this I suddenly remembered that a few months earlier, I had received this same mail. Sending it to my faculty Dean, I asked if he knew anything about this venue and whether I should consider it. I inferred that, according to the letter, the press had been established in 2001 by Cambridge alumni although they were “not connected to Cambridge University in any way.” The Dean answered, “Absolutely not. They are predatory publishers.”

The term “predatory publishers” sounded frightening. No one wants to meet predators outside nature reserves, zoos or nature films. An uncalled morning meeting with a predator on a home computer screen elicits a sense of danger. At any rate it is a powerful image to describe a publisher whose sin in most cases is that publishing with it would be considered inappropriate by the academic establishment. It is as though we are told that we are not safe in the book market jungle. At a certain moment, if I don’t climb a tree or flee as fast as I can, I am doomed to professional annihilation by these blood-sucking presses. What a nightmare!

Because this discussion with the Dean was conducted by mail, I didn’t ask what he meant nor did I wonder about the meaning of this metaphor, and truth be told, at that stage I wasn’t really interested. I was like the academics Susan described earlier: I didn’t question this labelling. In fact, it was convenient for me that he had determined this publisher’s fate and had saved me the uncertainty about whether to send the translated chapters of Malice Aforethought or not.

But now—discussing and writing about open access with Susan and Omri and seriously considering, against my friend’s advice, publishing my book in an unconventional way—I became curious. I wanted to see what this press, determined predatory by the Dean, was like. The publisher had a serious internet site and many book-jacket photographs of works they had published. They had an impressive list of advisory board members from all over the world; one of them was from Haifa University, a name that I recognized. But if the dean says something, he must know what he is talking about. On Wikipedia, there was an entry for “predatory publishing” and reading it, I understood that there were people who had made the effort to determine criteria for the phenomenon, and that Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, had published a blacklist of what he identified as such presses, but because of the threat of a legal suit from one of them, he had removed his list in January 2017. Another blacklist of these publishers was later created by Cabell International, a scholarly service company, and the list still exists. However, in order to obtain the information, it contains, you must purchase a subscription. On the internet you can find various catalogues that determine the nature of publishers to be avoided. But ostensibly, it appears that there is no actual agreement about what features make a publisher predatory. The lists of criteria are long, and the accusations vary. Thus, under this category you encounter completely corrupt publishers which invent members of their boards and steal articles from other places, together with publishers whose conduct arouses discomfort only because they deviate from the generally agreed-upon rules of the academic publishing game. This last group publishes books for payment (which is also done at times by well-known academic publishers such as Peter Lang, one of the A-ranking companies) and invites manuscripts from researchers like me. That was, by the way, Cambridge Scholar Publishing’s only sin, and from what I gathered, it does not request payment for publishing manuscripts and its advisory board is respected and completely genuine.

But soliciting manuscripts, I discovered, is apparently the original sin. A serious publisher stated that someone on one of the internet sites does not solicit manuscripts. Inviting manuscripts implicates a company as a predatory publisher, and consequently academics avoid sending it their work fearing it will risk their career. So, in order to survive, these publishers are forced, at times against their better judgement, to continue soliciting scholars’ work, immortalizing themselves as presses that should be avoided.

But why is it that a personal invitation to submit a manuscript has become such an incriminating criterion of academic publishers that I, having undergone effective academic socialization, have accepted it without objection up to now? It is also interesting to contemplate what it means that publishers have become unworthy for academic committees only because they seek interesting manuscripts in unusual places—among junior researchers, for example (and, by the way, well-known researchers with public status receive invitations to submit manuscripts from respected publishers, yet it does not damage their reputation or that of the publishers). Does it mean that in order to acquire intellectual significance my manuscripts must be accepted only by places which initially are not interested in hearing what I have to say? The perception that I am the one who must beg for attention rather than the publishers is indubitable. Yet each time that I have doubted this academic convention, I have ultimately received the same summary sentence: “You have to do what they say, because that’s just the way it is.”

At my desk in the library, I realize that responding to Susan’s story on the academic paywall contributes to me personally, since it enables me to question what is allowed and what is forbidden in the academic circles. I assume that this system works so effectively since we, who are professionally trained to ask questions and express our doubts, unquestionably obey institutional imperatives. I suspect that within the confusion and mayhem created by neoliberal academia, which demands that we teach more, publish more and serve the community more, we don’t have the time or strength to think properly and challenge the dictated rules. We only hope that someone like my Dean will appear to tell us what to do in specific circumstances, because there is such chaos around us and so much insecurity. The result is a system that has contracted into a list of regulations, directives and internal discourse, which has become less and less accessible. The result, as we showed in the previous chapter, is that the CV has become an enslavement mechanism, since writing that cannot be listed is not worth investing in.

At a dinner party a week before I travelled to our retreat in London, another friend had told me that she was finally opening her own book website on the internet and beginning to upload stories. She would ultimately upload complete books. It was not a blog; it was really a book website. I knew that it had taken her time to decide to move to this platform, and that it had been a difficult decision. She was not an academic, but she had written academic material and the search for publishers through the years had exhausted her. In theory, she had no obvious reason to search for respected academic publishers, as she had no CV to manage for the higher education market. But in our previous conversations, I discovered that academic notions of manuscript evaluation had been internalized and adopted by non-academics as well. If she as an outsider believed that appreciation of the academic system and the mainstream book market contributes to or even determines the value of a text, it is almost understandable why we as academics hold these views.

Apparently, most of us act like good soldiers but not because we blindly obey orders. More often than not we think that these principles are true, that the establishment’s directives of what is perceived as a valuable text, and what is not, are appropriate. We are not just afraid to challenge the rules; we often don’t feel the need to challenge. We usually believe that if we publish with a less prestigious publisher, our text loses in value.

But what would happen if I challenged this belief and published on the internet like my friend? I won’t earn a hug from the academic guild, but there’s a chance that I’ll be relevant to a larger audience outside, of whom only a small minority can currently enjoy this material. Perhaps what I have written will add something to someone’s life, like others’ texts have added to my own. Because of the constricted academic discourse which revolves around itself, the idea of publishing research results on the internet, a thought which had occurred to my friend when she realized that she had no reason to accept rules that would not be useful to her, had never dawned on me. Professional regulations dictate that I would first publish my material via guild channels, in peer-reviewed journals, preferably with A-ranking publishers and only later would I present them to the masses. This latter step however won’t contribute to me professionally and therefore it will only happen if I have the strength and desire to reach a wider audience and if I am not already busy with another research project.

When I spoke to a colleague about the fantasy of publishing my book on the internet, she looked at me wonderingly: “Just like that, without peer review?,” she asked. “Without feedback? How will you know that the text really meets accepted standards and that it is approved by experts in the field?”

I discovered that peer review in academia has existed for several hundred years, from when the first scientific journals appeared in the seventeenth century. In principle, these evaluations have power and significance because they may reveal and clarify problems in the arguments and the writing and may propose solutions.

But I have a problem with the way they have become entrenched in neoliberal academia. The work of evaluation is unpaid, but it is part of the advancement process. When we are asked by institutionally respected journals to read articles written by academics like us, we consent to do so even though we have neither the time nor the desire, because of other tasks. We evaluators are usually academics who are flooded with work and who read manuscripts in our/my area of expertise with growing weariness, and even boredom, articles which usually don’t enrich us with anything new. And struggling with our/my own impatience, we will sometimes react unprofessionally, reading superficially and responding accordingly, or confronting the author, because the structure of the sentence in the second paragraph angered us/me. When reviewers overcome their exhaustion and impatience, they are very effective and helpful in their feedback, but creeping feelings of exploitation elicited by this unpaid work sometimes result in performing the task inadequately, as a censored type of resistance. It seems to me unwise to place complete responsibility on their/our shoulders for distinguishing between the valuable and the valueless. There might be people outside of academic circles who, for various reasons, are much more interested in the produced knowledge and therefore could potentially review articles much more effectively. But their voices are not heard or do not count because they don’t have positions in academia or in research institutions. And since their significant comments are perceived as institutionally valueless and insignificant, and do not contribute to our advancement in the system, it doesn’t pay to publish in a way which will enable them to have access to our work, for example, on the internet.

The moment I leave the narrow circle of the guild and turn to various types of open access publishing, with its many possibilities, ranging from commercial to internet publishing, my writings lose their academic worth and I myself then lose my value as a researcher. So maybe we need to admit that publishing labels such as the publisher’s name and logo, the title of the journal—are more important than the contents of the book or article? How many times have my colleagues and I lamented articles and books whose content we were proud of, just because they were published with less esteemed presses and thus, their importance on our CV has lessened or we were advised to eliminate them from our publication list. We knew, as Omri exemplifies, that the same research/article/book manuscript would have gained us esteem if it had been issued by a publisher more respected in academic circles.

The understanding that choosing the right label is central clarifies for me the extent to which neoliberal academia has employed and enhanced the concept of the ivory tower. Since the establishment of the first universities in the Middle Ages, what has been studied and written within their halls has been meant for the selected few who were literate, and often those for whom the published works were in their field of expertise. Even today, when reading and writing has become common, and many national libraries are more accessible than they used to be, professional academic language constitutes a barrier for many people. Feminists often complain that gender studies, which were created by academics active in the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, are currently irrelevant to them, mainly because of the incomprehensible jargon (hooks, 1994; Mohanty, 2006). The format of academic publication increases distance and alienation and makes relevant accumulated knowledge even more inaccessible. This is particularly striking when an internet platform exists that could easily bring all knowledge to the public.

The three of us, with our CVs and our promotion in mind, decided after long discussions and quite a few shared reservations, to publish our book in one of the “top” academic publishers, as my friend would probably note. It was not an easy decision since Palgrave Macmillan, as all academic publishers, is not a free open access press. Unlike other presses it allows us to buy the option of distributing and circulating our book widely. We promised to ourselves before signing the contract that we would make all the necessary efforts to turn it into free open access. But what if we cannot access the money, or if another project draws our attention and efforts? To what extent are we committed to something that professionally won’t pay off?

In the library I look around at the experts who surround me. They are busy with their intensive reading and writing, and suddenly gazing at them and at the loaded shelves around us, I realize that perhaps we experts are cooperating with corporations which have taken control of publishing because that’s what maintains our power as knowledge holders. Maybe we academics also are somehow reluctant to freely share our intellectual property with whoever is interested? Maybe there is an (not necessarily intentional and definitely unspoken) unholy alliance between academic experts like us who wish to protect their products and the neoliberal structures (such as publishers, journals universities, research institutes and foundations) which have taken over the publication economy and block public access. This unspoken partnership allows us to feel we are still the owners of the cultural and symbolic capital we have laboured to construct.

Yet are we still the owners of our intellectual property? Haven’t we lost our assets to the journal and book industry a long time ago by agreeing to tick the boxes in every contract we have signed, which grants them the rights to our work? Sometimes we lose access to our own work. For example libraries pay huge sums of money to corporations for the use of journals and electronic books. However, the current reductions in library budgets in most universities and colleges mean a severe decrease of subscriptions that occasionally results in our inability to freely access our own publications in library databases.

So who am I/are we fooling?

But despite some attempts to spotlight the system, as Susan related, academic institutions rarely fight the corporations, nor do they object to this control, for instance, by endorsing the input of publishers that are open access. Rather, they grant these corporations power and identify them as respectable publishing platforms (Sage, Springer and others), making it clear that there is something in this structure that is appropriate, convenient and effective for us, the members of the academic ivory tower, which has always been closed off to outsiders.

There are no widespread protest and outspoken challenges to the neoliberal market system controlling research on the part of those who operate within the academic mainstream. Respected researchers like us, the writers of this book, could allow themselves to engage in a struggle or two because most of them/us already have esteemed status and tenure. As it happens, though, the only sporadic protests take place on the academic margins involving mainly those who do not share institutional profits (inter alia, students, temporary contract teachers and researchers in underfunded colleges). Open access publishers may be part of that struggle, and there are also known pirate sites publicizing books and articles illegally and in opposition to contracts with corporations, enabling researchers to access information subversively. Researchers in universities and colleges like myself also use these channels at present because budgets for libraries are falling and the libraries are less and less able to supply us with up-to-date knowledge. In other words, university collaboration with corporations and their surrender to them, as well as the cooperation of academics themselves, are not only depriving researchers of their intellectual property but also destroying their ability to meritoriously operate within the academic setting and preventing them from doing what they were meant to, creating new knowledge.

The situation is even worse for researchers in countries or institutions which lack resources. Researchers like me, who work in the underfunded colleges, can neither physically nor virtually access richer university research libraries and their databases, and thus their ability to delve deeply into the subject they are researching is impaired. Apparently, the problems of the academic system become acute when we are dealing with the periphery, any periphery.

The many levels of inaccessibility which are revealed when I navigate the academic spaces as a researcher and a writer remind me of the scene from A Room of One’s Own. In that scene, Virginia Woolf is sitting on a riverbank near one of the Oxbridge colleges, as she contemplates a lecture she has been requested to give about women and literature. It is a calm and pastoral moment at twilight during which a new intellectual idea is born and turns a tiny thought into a wave that does not allow her to continue sitting there. In a burst of emotion, she gets up and strides across the lawn, walking on the grass, but at that moment, the Beadle of the college arrives and demands that she walk on the gravel path as “[o]nly the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here” (p. 6). The original idea has been forgotten, but as she walks, she remembers two literary discussions about a manuscript and that these can be found at the library a few metres away. She decides to go and have a look at them herself, but at the door of the library: she thinks “I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction” (p. 7). Woolf cannot enter the “venerable” library because, as a woman, she has no right to be a lecturer at this respected college. She is thus excluded from direct entry to an entire space of knowledge.

“The library is closing in fifteen minutes,” the voice of the British Library recording takes me back to the present. Unlike Woolf, no guard blocked our way when we entered a few hours ago. He casually looked at our reader cards and let us in. As a female professor today, I can enter this library and I also can consider publishing Malice Aforethought with open access publishers or on the internet, turning it, if I wish, into a protest against corporate rule.

Despite the different circumstances, however, I can’t ignore the similarities. The gatekeepers are perhaps no longer white-haired English gentlemen, the space may not be the imposing old universities and the reasons and exclusion systems may have changed, but there is something in Woolf’s description that is reminiscent of the physical, institutional and psychological barriers that we all repeatedly experience in regard to the neoliberal academic setting.