Contribution short abstract:

What does the future hold for open access publication? Editors at MAT look forward to sharing their experiences and reflecting upon shared ambitions and challenges with peers across the open access landscape.

Contribution long abstract:

MAT is grounded in the comparative and ethnographic traditions of medical anthropology but encourages engagement with cutting-edge thinking from other disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. It seeks to bring researchers with diverse theoretical and political positions into conversation with one another and encourages authors to tackle major current debates, challenges, and events related to health and medicine.

As academic publishing moves towards an open access future, MAT is committed to building structures and ways of working that are accessible, inclusive, fair, ethical, and sustainable. MAT recognises that academic publishing is rooted in historical, gendered, and colonial power relationships. Open access publishing addresses some of these issues but also creates new risks, including the potential for new forms of unfair labour relations and gender hierarchies, as well as the consolidation of knowledge within elite institutions. Our journal ethos statement includes commitments to abolishing internships and volunteer labour for administrative tasks; establishing a fair, supportive, and inclusive editorial practice; ensuring robust complaints procedures are in place; distributing credit for journal work; and internationalising the readership, authorship, and governance of the journal.

We are particularly keen to reflect in community about the nexus of the labour required of open access outputs (wherein the publication becomes a press) and labour politics more generally. If open access publications require “more work,” how do we ensure that this work is compensated and equitably distributed?