In this self-declared “open access pamphlet,” the editors (and authors)— Kaja Marczewska, Janneke Adema, Frances McDonald, and Whitney Trettien—take a critical approach to open, digital scholarship. They frame such an approach within the concept of a scholarly “poethics,” or, an ethical poetics. This conception is present throughout the three short essays that make up this pamphlet. Marczewska offers “The Horizon of the Publishable in/as Open Access: From Poethics to Praxis,” where she rails against the co-opting and corporatization of the Open Access movement, and argues for a more action-oriented approach to open scholarship. In “The Poethics of Openness,” Adema advocates for a return to critical, experimental approaches to open scholarship; more specifically, she calls for

a form of doing scholarship that pays specific attention to the relation between context and content, ethics and aesthetics; between the methods and theories informing our scholarship and the media formats and graphic spaces we communicate through. [This] involves scholars taking responsibility for the practices and systems they are part of and often uncritically repeat, but also for the potential they have to perform them differently; to take risks, to take a wager on exploring other communication forms and practices, or on a thinking that breaks through formalisations of thought. (23)

In the final essay (“Diffractive Publishing”), Frances McDonald and Whitney Trettien vouch for an informal, boundary-object approach to digital scholarship. As an example, they discuss the thresholds project, which purposefully features “unfinished” or in development works. Overall, the authors / editors suggest that the future of open, digital scholarship might benefit from returning to its messier past—one which put less emphasis on the production of clean and portable PDFs that fit tidily into emerging neoliberal evaluation schemes.

Marczewska-et-al-cover

Work cited

Marczewska, Kaja, Janneke Adema, Frances McDonald, and Whitney Trettien, eds. 2018. The Poethics of Scholarship. Coventry, UK: Post Office Press and Rope Press. https://monoskop.org/images/f/f4/Post_Office_Press_ed_The_Poethics_of_Scholarship_2018.pdf