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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research within the EthnOA project, this paper presents preliminary insights from interviews exploring how “openness” is negotiated in everyday practice. What practices, tensions, and questions emerge when promises of democratization meet the realities of implementation?

Paper long abstract

The Open Access transformation promises democratized knowledge, increased visibility, and innovative publication formats. But how do these promises translate into practice? What labor, negotiations, and dilemmas emerge when actors implement openness in concrete institutional settings?

This paper shares preliminary results from ethnographic research conducted within the DFG-funded EthnOA project, which supports the Open Access transformation of three German anthropological journals while building sustainable infrastructures. Through qualitative interviews with diverse actors involved in the Open Access transformation, we examine how "openness" is negotiated as continuous design work extending beyond mere technical implementation – revealing it as both infrastructural labor and normatively grounded political practice.

Critical scholarship has raised important questions about Open Access: Does visibility always serve emancipatory aims, or can it create new vulnerabilities? Do digital infrastructures encourage acceleration and quantification? Can standardized platforms accommodate diverse forms of knowledge production? Rather than answering these questions theoretically, we let the actors speak – foregrounding the voices and experiences of those doing the work of transformation. These preliminary ethnographic fragments reveal openness not as a neutral technical achievement but as an ongoing process embedded in larger struggles over knowledge infrastructures and publishing ecosystems.

By presenting work in progress, we invite collective reflection on which forms of Open Science we want to shape, and how anthropology’s critical-reflexive approach might contribute to more careful, responsible practices of scholarly communication.