Uncivil obedience: The ethics of enabling cartels

Uncivil obedience is a related but opposite concept to the more familiar term civil disobedience. Uncivil obedience is protest through “conspicuous law-abidingness, display[ing] an extraordinary attentiveness to the rules on the books, as against common practice and widely shared sense of desirable practice” (Bulman-Pozen & Pozen, 2015, p. 818). A cartel is a group of companies who together, constitute a monopoly which coordinate pricing and market access to ensure higher profits and greater control. Academic publishers, particularly the so-called “big five” (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Sage, and Taylor & Francis) account for more than 50% of the academic journal articles published in 2013 (Larivière, Haustein & Mongeon, 2015) would seem to meet the definition of a cartel. We discuss the ethics of enabling or confounding this cartel and subverting their stranglehold on the results of public research funds and publicly funded research labour which underpin the peer-review and editorial systems critical to these academic publishers. We will discuss various methods and strategies which may constitute uncivil obedience in relation to the open access movement.