A Conversation on Openness and Enclosure with Suzanne Beth and Urooj Nizami
What do we mean when we talk about openness? And what can the history of enclosure teach us about the systems we often take for granted today? In this conversation, Urooj Nizami (UN) speaks with Suzanne Beth (SB) about the history and meaning of enclosure, beginning with the appropriation of common lands in early modern Europe and extending to contemporary questions about knowledge, access, and the commons. Stay until the end for a glimpse into how PKP’s software got its name!
Suzanne and I first met in Saskatoon in November 2023 at the Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) Major Scientific Initiatives (MSI) annual workshop. For both of us, it was our first time attending. I remember feeling an immediate kinship with someone who, like me, was trying to make sense of what our respective projects’ free and open source / open access scholarly communication infrastructure had in common with a neutrino and dark matter physics lab two kilometers underground. For two information / research professionals with training in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), one from Érudit and one from PKP, coming together to represent Coalition Publica, we found ourselves largely surrounded by infrastructures quite different from our own.
On the surface, it felt impossible to draw any sense of relatedness. Scholarly communication infrastructure and an underground particle physics lab seemed structurally and conceptually incommensurable. But, it was November 2023, and the dizzying brutality unfolding in Gaza made it impossible to keep any sense of separation intact. That disorientation was also forcing a reckoning: even systems that appear disconnected are mutually imbricated in the world. What had once felt like distance or tenuous connection was starting to shift into a more palpable understanding that things are connected in ways we are slow to see, or even resist seeing.
Since then, I’ve had the gift of many conversations with Suzanne. While those conversations so often bring new clarity for me on complex topics, they also open up many new questions. I’m grateful for the opportunity today to continue that inquiry and to delve more deeply into questions of openness and enclosure.
UN: Suzanne, you’re the Senior Coordinator for Research Communities and Partnerships at Érudit. Before your path into scholarly communications, you completed your PhD and conducted research in the field of film studies. As a scholar, you engage daily with the outputs of scholars and published research, but were you thinking about your own research through a lens of scholarly communications? What about the open access model first drew your attention?
SB: When I look back at my years as a PhD candidate and even as a postdoc, I’m quite struck that I was unaware of some of the most pressing issues surrounding scholarly publishing, even at the basic level of the extractive practices of the Big Five. This may be partly related to the fact that I always conceived of intellectual labor in the framework of friendship, as Giorgio Agamben for instance would use the term, which stresses the importance of collectives for the practice of thinking. Research is communal, not so much because it is conducted by a team in a lab, but because the capacity and the desire to think and to study is fundamentally shared. This is a very deep human drive, which should be cultivated and honored in itself – to me, this is what research is all about. In such a context, I think that I picked the journals in which to publish, not mainly as a rational agent navigating contemporary academia, but according to a logic of resonance, depending on calls for papers and invitations. I realize that I didn’t reflect enough, if at all, on the ways in which these publications would circulate, especially in the context of the transition from paper to digital publishing, that is, from collections available in physical buildings to online dissemination. It is as if I was taking the public library for granted!
UN: I don’t want to take too much space with a preamble because I’m impatient to get right into a meaningful conversation. But here I go anyway…
In the way I read scholarly communications, and the broader openness movement today, there are a number of intellectual lineages that are largely unacknowledged or at the very least under-engaged. Across all of these, however, is an acknowledgement that openness, as we tend to frame it today, isn’t confined to publishing alone. For some, it is anchored to ideals of freedoms and frictionless exchange. For others, it sits within a paradigm of material concerns, part of a much longer struggle against forces like enclosure of “our” commons.
As an introduction to what follows, by enclosure I’m referring to the process that began in the sixteenth century when lands that had long been used and governed collectively in an open field system by commoners, were gradually fenced off and brought under private control.
As an introduction to what follows, by enclosure I’m referring to the process that began in the sixteenth century when lands that had long been used and governed collectively in an open field system by commoners, were gradually fenced off and brought under private control. This led to shared worlds that had once been for grazing, farming, gathering, and sustaining communities being turned into ones that were bounded and extractable. This history is often traced from a feudal past to a capitalist present and foregrounds the gradual drawing of material, legal, and intellectual borders that reshaped access to land, resources, and knowledge.
I want to hear more about your thoughts on “open” as part of this broader history of enclosure? What do we gain when we connect the contemporary open access movement to those longer genealogies of centralized control, access, and power?
SB: In a context where we have to grapple with very strong forces insisting on their inevitability, genealogy is one of the most important forms of inquiry – as is, in another methodological direction, the speculative approach of pragmatist thinkers of science and technology such as Isabelle Stengers. Both work at contesting the necessity of what is present or hegemonic in spotting possible alternate routes, either in the future, as in the case of speculative thinking, or in the past, as do genealogic gestures. As I am more drawn to the past, I find myself more at ease in exploring our genealogies in search of the many junctions where one path was favored over the others, as a way to restore possibility or room for maneuver in places that seem otherwise completely locked.
Regarding more specifically the history of enclosure in relation to the contemporary movement for open access, I think that it should help us be more specific and thoughtful about how we understand openness, and hopefully prevent us from using it as a very generic, free floating ideal, disconnected from its material conditions and effects. Commons and their enclosure have been studied and discussed for a long time; drawing on this very rich body of works can equip us to push back against practices that work at uprooting the idea of openness from the conditions that indeed make knowledge common. In a field so deeply structured by corporate interest, openwashing looms large. Insisting on the conditions underlying the building and the maintenance of a commons seems like the most potent way to, again and again, fight against the uncoupling (découplage) between supposedly nice intentions and the actual means deployed.
UN: From your perspective as a scholar and research professional, what do we miss when we stay too close to the day-to-day work of supporting models like diamond open access publishing, without stepping back into a critical or deeper historical frame?
SB: I think that this is very important to support diamond open access publishing at every level, because the opposing forces are massive and unrelenting. But I also believe that doing it only at an operational level is disempowering because it forces us to dwell in a field in which these opposing forces are overwhelming and hegemonic. In other words, it forces us onto a terrain where we are in a position of weakness because it is already occupied by very entrenched practices and discourse, an apparatus that upholds the idea of academic “excellence” and distributes prestige through established patronage networks.
This is where stepping back into a deeper historical frame is important, because history is a site where we can grasp contingency. By this I mean that looking back at history leads us to uncover not only historical configurations that were different, although this can be very inspiring, but even more importantly it allows us to encounter, in a very concrete and vivid manner, what could have been (otherwise). It is very important to me to stress that history is the realm of the possible: it is transformed into necessity only by the victors’ narrative. I think that finding connection with moments in time when things could have turned out differently strengthens our position because this way we build a lineage, meet news allies and reconnect with arguments that are still relevant. It also reminds us that being, or feeling, virtuous is not a strategy, and therefore replaces struggles and conflicts at the heart of our situation. The issue is not that diamond OA is not as efficient or as high quality as gold OA, it is that we want to achieve different goals, that we contest that efficiency, for instance, should be an unchallenged ideal.
UN: One of the long term effects of enclosure seems to be that it obscures what came before it, making the present appear natural and inevitable. What can we learn from remembering the relationships people had to land before enclosure or thinking with parts of the world where this logic of ownership took longer to take hold? How might these histories or contexts help us imagine alternatives to the systems of scholarly communication that we take for granted today?
SB: I have started to answer this question earlier in this conversation, but I think I can build a bit on it to focus on our times, on the specificity of the terrible situation in which we are today, which is in many ways the result of several decades of neoliberal policies in academia. They have created an environment in which it is very difficult to advocate for social justice and champion practices that support it in academia, because the logic of competition and the discourse justifying it are ever more pervasive. We need research that elaborates more the effects of these policies on scholarly publishing in order to appraise the violent destruction that has unfolded during the last decades. From this reckoning, the past, and especially the history of the commons, is a great source of reflection to imagine a better future. Precapitalist and precolonial worlds indeed seem to me as rare sources of genuine alterity in the ways in which we conceive of what matters, and may therefore open futures that are truly divergent from our deeply unjust present.
UN: I appreciate your point about reducing scholarly inquiry to competition and this being in tension with social justice. Putting these two in conversation made me also think about the ways that social justice itself has become a field of competition in the neoliberal academy. Do you have thoughts on this?
SB: I must admit that it is not a topic on which I have been thinking enough to propose a firm answer. But it may relate to the fact that one of the deepest criticisms that can be addressed to capitalism all over its history, and of course there are long and venerable traditions of thinkers who have reflected on this, stems from the observation of the deep and seemingly unending social damage in its wake. It was true of the workers during the industrialization of European cities during the 19th century, but today, in the age of AI, one could point, for instance, to the people working for a few cents at tagging pieces of information to fine tune LLMs’ training, as well as to the psychic collapse of people, and especially the youth, resorting to chatbots for emotional support – this without mentioning the social and ecological devastation caused by the mining industry. Creating competition among movements advocating for social justice would seem like an effective, if very nihilistic, move to neutralize this potent criticism.
This issue makes me think of Japanese cinema, which I’ve been studying. When the state initiated a process of modernization of the country at the end of the 19th century, most Japanese had a fraught relationship with it. This process was the result of a set of reasons, including political movements within Japan, but it was really triggered by the direct pressure exerted by American warships approaching the Japanese coasts with a view to forcibly break the country’s radical isolationist policy and open trade routes. This policy, commonly known as sakoku, was established at the start of the 18th century in the context of European imperialism in Asia. The Japanese’s fraught relationship with the modernization process relates notably to the social havoc brought about by capitalism, which is a recurring topic in Japanese films of the 1920 and 1930. But of course, as cinema is itself a modern artifact, most filmmakers were also curious and interested in modernity. They were actively inhabiting this modern(izing) world and were not interested in the perspective that Japan goes back to in its radical isolation from the rest of the world. It seems to me that Japan is a very interesting case to think about the tensions between openness and enclosure, because the encounter with modernity occurred on this very terrain. This history, among other things, should prevent us from thinking about these issues without taking power dynamics into account.
It also feels like situating openness within these multiple genealogies helps us resist treating it as a kind of panacea, or single solution that can solve all problems. We’re currently in a moment where AI is forcing new questions about access and extraction about whether everything that is publicly available should also be freely used to feed these systems.
UN: In that sense, is openness irreconcilable with the current moment, or does it actually sharpen the challenge in productive ways?
SB: I’m not a specialist of the history of enclosure per say, but something that struck me in Samuel Moore’s book, Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons, dealing specifically with the notion of the commons in the context of contemporary scholarly publishing, is that a commons is never separated from a community of commoners, people who attend to it. This means that commons are not general or generic, but situated and limited: they relate to a context. Although they are not privatized or exclusionary, and especially allow for practices that are not monetized, they have a relationship to a form of closing. So, the opposite of enclosure would not be openness but more a practice of commoning. The idea of openness is certainly powerful, but when it’s taken on its own, it risks overemphasizing the end result and therefore bears the risk of obfuscating the ways or the manner in which it is realized. As much as commons are essential as material resources, they are precious because the care they demand creates a community, not the other way round. The promise of being relieved of having to care for what we value or depend on is a trap because it deprives us from communal bonds.
UN: In your own scholarly journey, how has enclosure figured as a concept you found yourself contending with? Was it something you encountered previously or primarily in your work in open access? As you work with questions of openness and enclosure, how have these frameworks shaped your work past and present?
SB: I think I first encountered the concept of enclosure in feminist scholar Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch, in which she studies the violences exerted against women, and especially knowledgeable women, in the context of the historical shift from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. What struck me most, at that time, was the connection Federici draws between these European phenomena and the concomitant colonization of the lands and people of what would become the Americas. Her work really focuses on the forms of domination characteristic of modernity, with dispossession at its core. I never directly drew on the history or concept of enclosure in my own work, but in my research, I was always interested in the harms done in the name or in the frame of modernity.
I think I first encountered the concept of enclosure in feminist scholar Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch, in which she studies the violences exerted against women, and especially knowledgeable women, in the context of the historical shift from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. What struck me most, at that time, was the connection Federici draws between these European phenomena and the concomitant colonization of the lands and people of what would become the Americas. Her work really focuses on the forms of domination characteristic of modernity, with dispossession at its core. I never directly drew on the history or concept of enclosure in my own work, but in my research, I was always interested in the harms done in the name or in the frame of modernity.
I find that enclosure is a relevant, and powerful lens through which to approach the current dynamics around open access. Scholarly publishing as an object of inquiry is fairly recent, but more studies are conducted by scholars in the wider disciplines of the sociology of science, information sciences or science and technology studies. They include Samuel Moore’s work, which is squarely situated in the lineage of the commons and their enclosure. But I think as well of Fernanda Beigel and Stefanie Haustein, who point, in different ways, to the deeply extractive, inegalitarian and self-serving system created by for-profit publishing. They do so by investigating the field empirically, and for Haustein quantitatively, but they do so from a background informed by traditions of analysis that have affinities with the framework of commons, commoning and the risk of their enclosure, such as data feminism in Haustein’s case, and the great Latin American school of thought on dependency, for Beigel.
UN: Finally, knowing what you know as both a researcher and through your position at Érudit, what is it like being a scholar working within the system, being someone who is responsible for helping to shape and advocate for its transformation from within?
SB: This is a very good question! Scholarly publishing may seem like a narrow, specialized, and ancillary realm, even from the point of view of scholars not directly engaging with it as a field of research – however important the act of publishing is for them. Yet, the fact that the dominant form of scholarly publishing is so massively extractive of public funds is one good reason to work at changing it. At a deeper level, I truly believe that knowledge is not separate from the conditions in which it is produced. This means that to have good and useful knowledge we must refuse the discourse and practices that justify domination and amplify inequalities. In this sense, advocating for diamond open access contributes to the fight against the commodification of knowledge and the forces underpinning it. These include the influence of commercial publishing on research assessment, hiring and tenure processes. Instead of these self-serving and fabricated prestige scales, diamond open access should be upheld because the public who is funding research should have access to it, and the researchers who conduct it should govern what gets published.
UN: Thank you, Suzanne, for your generous thoughts and time. Once again, I’ve learned so much from you through this process, and I’ve only gone down about a third of the rabbit holes I’m planning to! There is a direct correlation between our encounters and the length of my reading list!
It’s no coincidence that PKP’s software, for example, Open Journal Systems (OJS), not only bears a resemblance in name but also harkens to the history of the open field systems that were common in Europe and Asia before enclosure took root. John Willinsky, PKP’s founder, confirmed that one of the deeper influences on the naming of PKP software came from the revolt against the enclosure of the commons. This confirmation led to a lovely Monday morning conversation about the Levellers, the Diggers, open-source software, and Jimi Hendrix, all of which, in one way or another, helped shape his thinking.
Perhaps that’s the subject of our next interview! Stay tuned to find out.