Since I last wrote, I have had a few more thoughts on Samuel Moore’s book. Again, these are not necessarily things that he does not discuss or things that he should have discussed. They are merely thoughts that occurred to me in response to reading his work.

The first is that I do not think I understand the assertion that “rather than looking for the best ways to financially sustain learned societies in a post-open access world, I suggest that the work needed is to design structures for democratic self-governance of societies” (p. 175). I do not understand this because although they may be extremely conservative and nepotistic at times, most societies already have democratic self-governance to a large extent. Most sizeable learned societies are governed by the academics who form their membership through democratic structures that elect leaderships and executive committees who take action. This also points, for me, to one of the problems in calling for democratic self-governance as an answer to the prevailing ills of scholarly communications and publishing. Because democracies are not always progressive. They merely reflect what the major population wants, who govern a specific entity.

The other point that has been floating around my mind for the past few days is about notions of price, cost and profit in publishing environments. Moore, for example, is very keen to stress that by “commons” he does not mean a pool of resources from which anyone may take and reuse, but rather he is more interested in the practices of “commoning” that preach mutual reliance, self and other care, and democratic governance, as above. One of the ways that the book makes its argument around this is by dividing open access advocates into different groups, one of which seeks economic efficiency, which is expected through technology, but really results in an austerity that devalues labour. I do recognize what is being said here and agree that it is important not to think that we can simply eradicate labor in publishing by using technology.

But I have always thought that academic publishing could be cheaper because it could be not-for-profit, rather than a profit-making enterprise. This is especially not to say that not-for-profits do not need surpluses or something like that. But my motivating factor in joining the call for open access was my outrage at a 30% profit margin from big companies like Elsevier, when people could not afford to access crucial research. I still believe, without devaluing any labour, that academic publishing could be done more cheaply, simply by eradicating the 30% mark-up that Elsevier puts on its “services”. As I wrote at the end of OA and the Humanities, a decade ago:

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. (p. 151)

I was also thinking about the realpolitik of scaling small and what it means for the research community at large. Let us suppose that, ideologically, Moore is correct and what we need are small, connected, archipelagos of experimental, bespoke, and caring activities in publishing, centred around commoning. (PS the term “commonsiness” is really hard to read without sounding like Gollum.) And let us say that libraries decided en masse to give financial support to such enterprises because, strained as they are, it represents the most ethical route forward in academic publishing. What does this mean for the scale of research as a whole? It seems to me clear that without the economies of scale that are here derided and the market conditions that tend towards standardisation, we would see a substantial reduction in the volume of material that could be published, because, let’s face it, resources from universities in countries such as the United Kingdom are massively dwindling.

Is this an ethical outcome? Is it more important to fix various conditions in publishing than to ensure that papers on curing cancer are published? That said, I don’t know that Moore envisages the situation where “scaling small” actually scales to be a dominant force. If it does, though, it places substantial economic expectations upon a system that has ditched economies of scale for more ethical and care-full ways of working. Or it could be that scaling small actually functions as a form of immanent critique, an inside resistance force that constantly challenges the dominant hegemony without ever fully displacing it, merely showing through critique what is so wrong with our current setup.

The American writer, Thomas Pynchon, on whom I have written extensively, shows conflicting sentiments about these forms of immanent resistance and critique. In Gravity’s Rainbow he envisages a “Counterforce” who are supposedly the resistance against the novel’s structures of death and decay. However, as I noted in Pynchon and Philosophy:

the direct opposition, The Counterforce, achieves only limited success in urinating over a table of executives (636). Indeed, it is referred to in the context of Roger Mexico’s dream as ‘the failed Counterforce’ (713) and Stefan Mattessich summarises it thus: ‘[t]he Counterforce produces no coherent program for undoing the structures of death that menace civilization in the novel’

It always used to bug me when we were setting up the Open Library of Humanities when people would ask: “but what will you do if this becomes hugely successful and massively big and as big as Taylor and Francis etc?” In my head, I was always thinking: “well, we’re just trying to get this off the ground at this point. There is no way this is going to be that big. Although I am very pleased that you think it a possibility that we could achieve market monopoly from our little scholar led startup.” My critique here of scaling small and its capacity to grow horizontally to be a dominant force is probably the same kind of thing, but then I just want to ask how such a model can threaten the market systems that are currently dominating academic publishing and that cause so much harm and damage.

So perhaps these are not the right questions. Perhaps, instead, we need to conceive of these “publishing beyond the market” enterprises as immanent utopias, spaces that show possibility within a system that they cannot overthrow, but that they can nonetheless structure through critique. At the same time, I feel that we will need pragmatic interventions that can cause active damage to for-profit vultures in this space; there is no harm in pragmatic ventures that help us to get closer to the possibilities that Moore has outlined, through economic experiments (like Opening the Future, mentioned by Moore on pp 150-1) and other university-press-like structures.

References

  • Eve, Martin Paul, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014) https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012
  • Eve, Martin Paul, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
  • Moore, Samuel A., Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (University of Michigan Press, 2025)
Image: Book Open (Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash)