I would like to further extend this practice-based project, both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), and the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose.

Is this true within an academic publishing context? First copy costs remain substantially high: editing, review, typesetting, server and band with costs, marketing etc. are still part of a digital only model. One thing that is important to explore though is what these first copy costs consist off in a digital context, to explore from there what the profit margin is that publishers put on top (plus cost for printing etc.). This could lead to the development of perhaps a more fair and transparent system based on actual costs. For books the OAPEN-NL project tried to do exactly this: https://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/oapen-nl-final-report.pdf

One of the complaints I hear more and more often from academics is that traditional publishing houses are actually no longer doing this work. Editing and formatting are increasingly outsourced to academics themselves (as are indexing etc.) and even marketing is something publishers ask authors to so themselves using their social media profiles and academic brands. This is one of the issues many scholar-led publishing initiatives are trying to address, by highlighting for example the various processes that go into creating a scholarly publication and giving these due recognition. Mattering Press is at the forefront of this:https://www.matteringpress.org/

http://www.csisponline.net/2014/06/18/from-openness-to-openings-reflections-on-the-experiments-in-knowledge-production-workshop/

If this special issue of Ephemera ever comes out (I have been keeping an eye out for it but nothing as yet) it might be highly relevant for this discussion: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/content/labour-academia-0 Back issues of Ephemera do cover topics related to this discussion too though, so might be a relevant resource anyway (and OA!)

And most of what actually comprises our work in the 21st Century, such as this kind of discussions, will never give us any "points" in the "game" of publishing, where only the final outcomes (that are still produced under a pre-digital, Gutenbergian paradigm) count for something. A system oriented to quantification and control over 19th century media. Please note I am not saying that I would prefer that my tweets counted toward my career, but indeed further highlighting the inconsistencies and absurdity of the current academic publishing policies (and market).

It is interesting, in comparing foucauldian and cybernetic conceptualisations of power (Wiener, 1948, and especially Von Foerster, 2002) to highlight similarities and differences. While both constructions are deeply relational, showing how power is not simply imposed but co-constructed, the cybernetic ideal is markedly (and maybe deceivingly) more optimistic, by focusing on the mutuality of this relationship. Maybe only a plurality of epistemologies and points of view can help us successfully navigate and resist the pervasivity of power.

I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?