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Second-order notes Series

The form of a free journal

Second-order notes on ‘On diamond open access: The donated hour’

Second-order notes are the workings behind a commentary published elsewhere. The commentary is written to stand on its own and names no theorist. These notes name them, and show how the observation was built. [Link to the University World News article to be added on publication.]

Prologue: on being right

The first note in this series was about a question – whose rules? – and the ways a host can answer it. This one is about a rarer event: an argument that was won. cOAlition S, the alliance of research funders behind Plan S, wrote into its strategy for the next five years what the periphery of the publishing system had argued for a decade: that the article processing charge drove costs upward and pressed inequity outward, and that the way forward runs through models that charge nobody at either door – diamond open access among them.

The commentary takes this as its opening situation and then makes one move: it asks what being right costs, and finds the answer in the donated hour – the unpaid academic labour on which Africa’s fee-free journals run. As before, the plain-English essay sits on two bodies of work it does not name: George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a calculus of distinctions, and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, this time above all his account of the economy as a system that observes the world through payments.

Neither is needed to read the commentary. Both are needed to explain why it is shaped the way it is – and why its central image is an hour rather than a sum of money.

1. The form of a price

Spencer-Brown’s calculus begins with one instruction: draw a distinction. A distinction splits a space into two sides and lets an observer indicate one of them, leaving the other unmarked. The commentary compresses this into a definition that carries the whole essay: a price is simply a cost that has been written down where everyone must read it.

Read formally, a price is a mark. It indicates a cost on the marked side of a form – at the author’s door, in the APC era, in currency and in advance. What the mark does not do is create the cost, and what erasing the mark does not do is destroy it. In the calculus, crossing back from the marked state does not annihilate the space; it returns the observer to the unmarked side, which is not nothing but simply the side without an indication. The first note in this series ended on this point – the unmarked space waits – and the free journal is its economic case: diamond open access erased the writing, and the cost crossed to the side of the page that nobody reads.

Figure 2. The free journal as re-entry Three panels drawn in Spencer-Brown’s notation. Left: the APC era, the cost marked as a price at the author’s door, inside the form of scholarly publishing. Centre: diamond open access, the price erased; the cost drawn in dashed line on the unmarked side of the form. Right: the question ‘who pays?’ re-entered inside the journal’s own form, as the donated hour. A dashed arrow from left to right reads: the price is erased; the cost crosses. scholarly publishing the price, at the author’s door scholarly publishing the cost, unwritten same cost, unmarked side the free journal ‘who pays?’ re-entered, as the donated hour The APC era Diamond The back office the price is erased; the cost crosses
Figure 2. The free journal as re-entry. Left: the APC era, the cost marked as a price at the author’s door. Centre: diamond, the price erased; the same cost drawn dashed on the unmarked side. Right: the question ‘who pays?’ re-entered inside the journal’s own form, as the donated hour. The price is erased; the cost crosses.

That is the entire skeleton of the commentary’s third and fourth sections, and it explains a choice of vocabulary. The essay never says that diamond journals are ‘really’ paid for, as if exposing a fraud. There is no fraud. There is a form with two sides, and a sector that has been reading only one of them.

2. Payment is how the economy sees

Why does the unwritten side stay unread? Luhmann’s account of the economy supplies the answer, and it is more interesting than stinginess.

In his theory of functional differentiation, modern society has no summit; it has function systems – politics, law, science, education, the economy – each operationally closed, each observing the world through its own distinction. The economy, on Luhmann’s account in Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, reproduces itself through payments. Every payment connects to further payments; whatever cannot take the form of a payment is, for the economy, simply not an event. Prices are the economy’s sensory apparatus: the form in which it makes scarcity observable to itself and communicable onward.

The consequence is exact. A cost that carries no price is not a small cost; it is an invisible one – invisible, that is, to the one system whose business is costs. Society at large can see it perfectly well: the editor’s household sees it, the colleague waiting for the delayed review sees it, the reader of the commentary sees it by the end of a paragraph. But budgets, procurement offices, funding councils and five-year strategies are organisations that couple to the economy, and what has no price arrives in their deliberations with no weight.

This is why the EIFL survey that anchors the commentary matters beyond its findings. Asking two hundred fee-free journals who does the work and who pays for the domain name is an act of translation: it converts unpriced labour into something an organisation can read – a percentage, a finding, a document with a grant number. Six in ten journals on volunteers; seven in ten without a budget. The survey writes the unmarked side down. It is, formally, the beginning of a price.

3. The blind spot, and what vindication is

The commentary insists that the coalition’s decade of not-seeing was not hypocrisy, and the insistence is theoretical rather than diplomatic. Every observation observes with a distinction and therefore cannot, in the same operation, observe that distinction. The observer’s blind spot is not a defect of attention; it is the cost of seeing anything at all.

The coalition observed publishing through the distinction open/closed. With that distinction in hand, the APC looked like a solution: it opened the reader’s side of every paywalled page. What the distinction could not show was what the instrument of opening – payment – was doing on the author’s side. To see that, one needed a different observer, positioned where the fee landed.

The periphery was that observer. Second-order observation, in Luhmann’s usage, does not see more than first-order observation; it sees differently – it sees the distinction the other observer is using, and therefore what that observer cannot see. AmeliCA and the Latin American networks did exactly this in 2019: they observed Plan S observing, named the distinction it was using, and predicted what it would exclude. Africa’s fee-free journals performed the same observation in practice rather than in print, by running a publishing system in which the excluded had never been asked to pay.

This yields a compact definition of the commentary’s opening event. Vindication is what happens when a second-order observation is adopted by the observed system as its own self-description. The centre did not discover a new fact in November; it re-described itself in the periphery’s terms. “The centre has discovered what it had been told” is that definition with the theory removed.

4. The re-entry of ‘who pays?’, and why the answer is an hour

The deepest move in the commentary is the one its title makes quietly. The question ‘who pays?’ is a distinction – payer/non-payer – and the diamond journal is the attempt to expel that distinction from the journal’s form altogether: no one pays, at either door. But a distinction constitutive of an operation cannot be expelled; it can only re-enter. Inside the journal that charges nobody, the distinction reappears between the journal’s own people: those paid to be there, and those who are not. The commentary renders this as front door and back office.

Spencer-Brown gives re-entry a remarkable property. A form that re-enters its own space can no longer be evaluated to a single state from within the calculus; its value becomes imaginary, and the resolution he offers is time – the form oscillates, or holds a state as memory. The first note in this series used the memory reading: a name holding a state the ground no longer held. This note needs the other reading. The free journal’s ‘who pays?’ has no stable answer inside the journal’s form – it is designed not to have one – and so the question is resolved the only way an unresolvable form can be resolved: temporally. The journal pays in time.

That is why the commentary’s controlling image is the donated hour and not the donated rand or naira. The hour is not a metaphor for the cost; it is the literal currency in which a re-entrant form settles its accounts. Unpriced work is paid in the one medium the economy cannot register and the calculus specifically requires. When the essay says the cost “moved into evenings”, the sentence is doing exact theoretical work while sounding like an observation about marking loads. Both are true. That is the house method.

There is a further, sharper point the commentary gestures at in one line: “the absence of a crisis is read, by everyone upstream, as the absence of a cost.” An oscillating form that keeps being resolved by somebody’s time looks, from outside, like stability. The better the volunteers, the less visible the volunteering. This is the same structure the syncopathy essay found in verification – the check that finds nothing produces no artefact – and it is worth noting that the two essays share a form: both are about operations whose success erases their own evidence.

5. ‘Diamond’ as semantics: the name arrives late

Luhmann kept a running distinction between social structure and semantics – the stock of descriptions a society has available for what it is doing. Semantics lag. Structures change first; the words catch up when some observer needs them.

Scholar-led, fee-free publishing existed at scale for decades – in Africa, in Latin America – without a name of its own. It acquired one at roughly the moment the centre needed to describe it inside its own vocabulary, as a candidate policy rather than as somebody else’s improvisation. The commentary’s joke, that before its mineral branding the practice was called making do, is a one-sentence sociology of knowledge: the periphery had the structure, the centre supplied the semantics, and the naming is what made the practice observable to strategies, funders and five-year plans.

And the name the centre reached for is a precious stone – the economy’s own imagery, pressed into service to describe the one corner of publishing that had escaped it. A system that can only see prices, asked to describe the priceless, calls it a diamond. No satire could improve on that, which is why the commentary does not try; it reports the name and moves on. The laughter, as ever in this series, is at the form, and everyone is inside the form.

6. The prescription: write the cost back down

The commentary ends with three asks: editorial labour counted in workload models and promotion criteria; institutional subsidies that outlive the financial year; and funders who have adopted diamond as a destination pricing it honestly, beginning where it was proved. Formally, the three are one instruction, and it is the mirror of the instruction that closed the first note. That note ended: mark in advance what would otherwise be marked later by decree. This one ends a step earlier in the same grammar: write down what is otherwise paid in silence.

Each ask is a re-marking. A workload model that counts editing writes the donated hour onto the side of the page that promotion committees read. A subsidy that survives the financial year converts an annually re-argued favour into a premise – a decision that later decisions must take as given, to borrow the vocabulary of the first note. A funder’s payment converts the cost into the one form the economy can see. None of this abolishes the generosity on which the journals run; it abolishes the pretence that the generosity is free, which is the commentary’s closing distinction – kept, deliberately, for the last line, where the essay’s humour is not allowed to follow.

The risk section of the commentary – the prize we must not win – is the same analysis run forward. If the centre adopts the periphery’s model without re-marking its cost, then the unmarked side scales with the model: the world’s publishing system comes to rest on hours donated at the periphery, and the arrangement never appears in any document, because unmarked is precisely what it is. “A settlement nobody signs” is the plain-English rendering of a structure that persists without ever becoming a decision.

Coda: the observer pays

A confession of method, in the spirit of the series. The commentary counts other people’s donated hours from a certain analytic distance – surveys, percentages, a respondent’s sentence quoted in the tone of a weather report. These notes are written in some of mine. A blog like this one runs on exactly the economics it describes: unpriced time, spent because the work seems worth doing and the form seems worth showing. I do not offer this as an irony. It is simply the observation that the observer is inside the observed system, which is where every observer in this series has been standing all along.

Whether the sector re-marks its costs is a question for budgets and committees, and the commentary addresses them in their own language, without footnotes to any of the above. If the theory is right, it should be possible to show the working; and if the working is elegant, it should be a pleasure to read. That remains the wager. Like the commentary, these notes were co-created with the #re_v5 engine, and the errors, as ever, are mine to observe.

References

Theory

  • Luhmann, N. (1988). Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Payments as the economy’s elemental operations; prices as its self-observation.)
  • Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Trans. J. Bednarz Jr with D. Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Luhmann, N. (2002). Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Ed. W. Rasch. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (See “The Paradox of Observing Systems” on the blind spot and second-order observation.)
  • Luhmann, N. (2013). Theory of Society, 2 vols. Trans. R. Barrett. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Structure and semantics.)
  • Spencer-Brown, G. (1969). Laws of Form. London: George Allen and Unwin. (The mark, the unmarked state; ch. 11 on re-entry, imaginary value and time.)

The case