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 seems far from the concept of overlay journals that prompted this discussion but that is, actually, the logical conclusion engendered by such thinking.

It makes no sense for open-access advocates to be ‘anti-publishers’. Publishers perform necessary labour that must be compensated and any new system of dissemination, such as open access, will require an entity to perform this labour, even if that labour takes a different form at different levels of compensation. One may be opposed to speciﬁc practices of extant publishers, or particular hypothetical publishing enterprises, but it is not possible to desire the functions of ﬁltering, framing and ampliﬁcation without there being a publisher, even if this publisher is also the author. Nor, I would suggest, should one be opposed to competition between publishers, which can foster beneﬁts for researchers. What seems problematic, instead, are historical genealogies that make it difﬁcult to modify the current system of publication, which was born in an era before the internet. It is also clear, however, from the investigations mounted throughout this book that the economics of scholarly communications are extremely complex and that there are some genuine risks for publishers who dip their toes into these waters, so caution is to be advised and the rhetoric of ‘disruption’ avoided. However, as the music industry has perhaps best shown us, the internet is not going away and to ﬁnd new models sooner appears to be a more sensible approach.19 As the opportunity cost of not venturing into these territories mounts, it becomes incumbent on researchers, librarians, publishers and funders not only to enter into dialogue about suitable transition strategies but also to ensure that our thinking is not bounded by what merely exists. Without a broader horizon of possibility for what our practice might look like, even in the face of pragmatic difﬁculties, we will not have lived up to McGann’s call, the epigraph to this book, to mount a practical self-criticism.