Joe Deville is a Professor in Science and Technology Studies based jointly in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology and School of Arts. His research interests include: 

• Scholarly publishing and open access infrastructures
• The everyday, embodied life of debt, credit and finance
• Autonomous systems, methods of algorithmic prediction, futures of credit scoring
• Science and technology studies, speculative sociology, non-representational theory

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/joedeville.bsky.social 

A key area of focus has been Open Access publishing and the politics of scholarly communication. I am particularly interested in researching and building the infrastructures, workflows and communities needed to change how scholarly knowledge circulates.

I am currently exploring these challenges as Principal Investigator of the Open Book Futures project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund, and running from May 2023 until April 2026. This project follows directly from the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project which ran from November 2019 to April 2023, on which I was a Co-Investigator and which was supported by the same two funders.

In both these projects, the focus has been on ways to deliver a fairer more sustainable future for Open Access book publishing. I became interested in this work as an editor and co-founder of the small Open Access book publisher, Mattering Press.

Within the Open Book Futures project, one of my main areas of work is leading and building up the Open Book Collective (OBC), which I also run as Managing Director. It is an independent non-profit which raises funds for book publishers and infrastructure providers deeply committed to Open Access. A key aim is the enable the OBC to be wholly self-sustaining by the end of the Open Book Futures project.

I support the work of other open scholarly infrastructures. I am Co-chair of the Invest in Open Infrastructure Steering Committee and Co-coordinator of the OPERAS Business Models Working Group, a part of the overall Open Access Books Special Interest Group.   

I am also interested in how issues of ethics and security become entangled when organisations encounter or prepare to encounter Autonomous Systems. This includes a past project working with colleagues as part of the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems: Security Node, an EPSRC funded project bringing together social scientists and computer scientists to explore these questions. This in turn connects to earlier work on informational mobilities and big data credit scoring.

I have a longstanding interest in the interactions between defaulting debtor and debt collector, which was the subject of my first book Lived Economies of Default, published by Routledge in 2015. There and in other related publications, I sought to simultaneously explore the intimate dimensions of financialised life and their encounter with organisational expertise.

In doing so, I have developed an economic sociology informed by approaches from science and technology studies, speculative philosophy and non-representational theory. I am keen to build up science and technology studies as a field within Lancaster University, which I work on in my role as Director of the Centre for Science Studies, as well as a member of the Centre for Technological Futures. 

I have also co-edited two books: Practising Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations, published by Mattering Press in 2016, and Markets and the Arts of Attachment, published by Routledge in 2017.