"Social justice in scholarly publishing: Open access is the only way"

Abstract

The title of this presentation is borrowed from the title of a 2017 article in The American Journal of Bioethics, which opens with the incontrovertible observation, “we live in an unequal world.” The arenas in which inequality plays out are many and varied, but one of them happens to be our intellectual heartland of scholarly publishing. If social justice is an end we believe in, then open access is a means by which we, as researchers and teachers, can meaningfully move the dial toward equality. In this talk, we sketch some ideas that show how we can do that together, and why we should try.