Contesting the Neoliberal Discourse of the World Class University: ‘Digital Socialism’, Openness and Academic Publishing

The principal aim of this paper is to contest the neoliberal discourse of the World Class University (WCU). The first section provides an understanding of the concept of the WCU within the context of a global competitive model of the knowledge economy and contrasts it with the social-democratic model based on open science and education that also provides links between new modes of openness, academic publishing and the world journal architecture. The paper makes the case for ‘knowledge socialism’ that accurately depicts the greater communitarian moment of the sharing and participative academic economy based on peer-to-peer production, social innovation and collective intelligence. It instantiates the notion of knowledge as a global public good. Profound changes in the nature of technology has enabled a kind of ‘digital socialism’ which is clearly evident in the shift in political economy of academic publishing based Open Access, cOAlition S, and ‘Plan S’ (mandated in 2020) established by national research funding organisations in Europe with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC). The social democratic alternative to neoliberalism and the WCU is a form of the sharing academic economy known as ‘knowledge socialism’. Universities need to share knowledge in the search for effective responses to pressing world problems of fragile global ecologies and the growing significance of technological unemployment. This is a model that proceeds from a very different set of economic and moral assumptions than the neoliberal knowledge economy and the WCU.