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Contribution short abstract

Open Access has transformed scholarly publishing and created new possibilities. However, its entanglement with digital technologies, used to accelerate research and boost efficiency, raises ethical and epistemic concerns, particularly for data-sensitive fields like Cultural and Social Anthropology.

Contribution long abstract

The transformation of scholarly publishing through Open Access (OA) has created new possibilities – while also introducing new dilemmas. Initially an activist movement challenging publisher monopolies, OA has become mainstream, broadly supported by policymakers, funders, and institutions within a broader Open Science agenda.

The internet thrives on the fantasy of a wide dissemination of ideas; Open Science builds on this premise. But does the availability of publications and research data truly democratize knowledge?

As critics have noted, since its early declarations, OA has been shaped by a techno-deterministic development narrative that persists despite decades of anti-colonial critique and assumes technological progress naturally resolves global inequities. Moreover, OA today is often aligned with capitalist ideologies of growth and efficiency, fostering a logic of evaluation that reduces scholarly impact to quantifiable metrics (Haider 2018).

This raises concerns for Cultural and Social Anthropology: How can we reconcile research ethics with unforeseen effects of digital transformation? How can we address fears of misuse of information about research contexts and informants’ life worlds? How can researchers and informants be protected from persecution, given the global rise of right-wing ideologies? How can we safeguard our understanding of knowledge without fading into invisibility? What forms of expertise, care, and critical reflection are necessary to open space for alternative realizations of Open Science that challenge rather than reproduce existing power structures?

We address these questions by sharing insights from our work on the OA transformation of the Journal for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis in the DFG project EthnOA.