Formed in 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of more than 70 members, we promote a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences. What we have in common is an understanding of open access as being characterised by a spirit of ongoing creative experimentation. We also share a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly communication practices to creative critique, together with the institutions that sustain them (the university, the library, the publishing house and so on). The collective thus offers a radical ‘alternative’ to the conservative versions of open access that are currently being put forward by commercially-oriented presses, funders and policy makers.
Our mutually-supportive community is made up of publishers, theorists, scholars, librarians, technology specialists, activists and others, from different fields and backgrounds, both inside and outside of the university. We work together to champion some of the most intellectually and politically exciting ways of achieving open access that are currently available internationally. At the same time, as part of our refusal to concede open access to the forces of conservativism and the market, the collective attempts to strengthen alliances between the open access movement and related struggles that are likewise concerned with the right to access, copy, distribute, sell and (re)use artistic, cultural and academic research works and other materials. This includes, but is not limited to, those associated with FLOSS, p2p file sharing, platform cooperativism and so-called internet piracy.
You can read more about the philosophy behind radical open access here.