Recent developments in the scholarly communication landscape — particularly the acquisition of several platforms that have supported the open-access dissemination of academic work by major corporate interests — have led a number of institutions to think seriously about what has been called “academy-owned infrastructure.” This infrastructure, however, is often far more complex and expensive to develop, much less sustain, than any single institution can manage. And this fact runs us headlong into a key aspect of the crisis facing higher education today: that scholars as individuals, and our universities as institutions, are far more likely to understand ourselves as being in competition with one another than as working in collaboration. As I argue in
Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins, 2019), changing this mindset and the institutional structures that derive from it may be the single most important step we must take if we are to save our institutions from the forces that are undermining its operation. This talk will approach the future of academy-owned infrastructure, then, through ways of thinking about sustainability beyond the technical, and beyond the financial, focus on the social connections and commitments that underwrite the work necessary to keep collective, not-for-profit forms of scholarly infrastructure running.
Interview with Fitzpatrick in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 26, 2019)