Five minutes with Prof Sarah Kember, Goldsmiths Press
Tell us about Goldsmith Press
Goldsmiths Press was launched in 2016 with the idea that being online and open access was going to be part of our publishing model but that we still needed to work with a global distributor for print books. I think there were practical (i.e., marketing) and philosophical reasons for this. As Director of the Press, I’m also Professor of New Technologies of Communication. For decades I’d been teaching my students that new technologies do not simply replace old ones, tech progress is an ideology and the reality is something more like remediation – the combining of old and new. Happily, my publishing consultant Adrian Driscoll, who helped set up the press, agreed.
Our aims were, and still are, about intervening in the politics of communication. The launch of the press more-or-less coincided with my inaugural lecture, ‘Why Publish? The Politics of Communication in Perishing Times’. It was subsequently published (!) open access so you can read it here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1042. It sets out a manifesto for the future of scholarly publishing which has a lot to do with recognising what I would now call the corporate capture of open access (see my latest article with Amy Brand on this: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-corporate-capture-of-open-access-publishing) and the complex ties between scholarly publishing and the increasingly constrained conditions of possibility within the academy itself. The audit culture, specifically the REF (UK), has arguably contributed to the overproduction and standardisation of scholarly output and closed the space for more writerly, speculative or imaginative forms of writing (outside of creative writing departments). This matters to me a lot as someone who writes fiction as well as theory and has a real taste for messing those false distinctions up.
Goldsmiths Press exists in significant part to create a space for other academics to write more freely.
What is your proudest achievement at the Press?
Creating spaces for other academics to write more freely. We have our Unidentified Fictional Objects (UFO) series for hybrid and speculative writing and our own original feminist science fiction imprint, Gold SF.
I’m also proud to have such distinguished editors for these and other series. We rely on, and very much appreciate our series editors who have a real and justified sense of ownership and who enable us to commission great books without having a commissioning editor.
What challenges do open institutional publishers face as a sector?
The fact that open access policy, designed to challenge the dominance of the commercial sector, has unintentionally led to its increased power and profitability through double dipping, transitional agreements (bigger than the big deals) and data extraction. Again, find more on this here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-corporate-capture-of-open-access-publishing. The answer, in as far as there is one, lies in proper public funding (UKRI’s current ringfenced sum of £3.5m for monographs is derisory) including for arts, humanities and social sciences and massive infrastructural investment. I was once asked by someone at UKRI if we should have a national OA platform and my answer was yes. Platform capitalism is creating new monopolies out of old, increasing surveillance and data extraction and generating obscene profits from published research that are not shared with either the publishers or universities that invest in it. Corporate platforms such as Academia.edu are, in my view, parasites. Public or cross-institutional platforms would require large-scale investment and collaboration in order to match up. The stakes are high. We are currently losing our public knowledge infrastructure to corporate interests.
What has been the response to the Press from academics at your institution and beyond?
Encouraging. We have a strong editorial and advisory board and a good balance between Goldsmiths and non-Goldsmiths authors. Our partnership with The MIT Press has helped us gain visibility and credibility and academics relate to our mission to address the politics of communication from policy down to scholarly practices such as peer review and citation.
Goldsmiths has quite a distinctive brand, and this has helped. I still feel as if I’m operating within the admittedly wide remit that this gives me but I’m always on the look-out for people and projects that can add a new edge to our edginess. I no longer, and perhaps never really believed this has to do with digital formats (though I love what we did here: https://phone-and-spear.pubpub.org/) or even reinventing analogue formats like essays, pamphlets and manifestos (though we publish these too). I suspect it will be about finding more authors who want to write in the spaces between categories like science and fiction, and in the process, generate new (non) disciplines.
How can we find out more about Goldsmiths Press?
You can find out more about us at the links below.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/
https://www.instagram.com/goldsmithspress/
Mastodon: https://bookish.community/home
Open Institutional Publishing Association 
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