Publishing as Commons

I very much enjoyed reading Samual Moore’s Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (2025). It was a book that I would have liked to have read before David Pettegrew and I published our paper: 

It may have compelled me to shift from thinking about scholar-led publishing as a form of punk-tinged conviviality to an exercise in “commoning” academic knowledge. For Moore, thinking about academic knowledge as part of a commons requires us to recognize our obligations as commoners and the process of publishing academic knowledge as commoning. Commoning involves a commitment of care for the production of academic knowledge for the benefit of all commoners. This should also involve a recognition that the process of commoning must involve care. Moore recognized the advantage of scholar-led publishing is that it places in the hands of those most committed to the well-being of the commons (as academic knowledge is our stock-in-trade as commoners), the obligation of commoning.    

I’ve simplified Moore’s complex arguments here. They largely developed from his incisive critique of open access initiatives championed by large (and mainly for profit) publishers. He was especially critical of their use of article processing charges (APC) as a tool to generate potential revenue lost from subscriptions (which may well be a spurious assumption at this point) and to bankroll these publishers’ shift to content aggregators and curators. Moore’s book didn’t quite anticipate the pace that AI has accelerated the role that open access will play in monetizing private sector curation of academic knowledge (often under the rubric of “data analytics”). That said, he has joined the chorus of critiques that see the current trends in open access driven by for-profit publishers as antithetical to an understand of scholarly knowledge as a commons.

That said, he still recognizes that the market has a role in the commons. After all, one solutions to market consolidation and the emergence of powerful, almost monopolistic  scale of current academic publishers is to encourage the development of new markets. This is the model driven — ostensibly — by Plan S, a publisher influenced plan to fund and develop open access publishing in Europe. Moore realizes that a plan shaped by APCs, data analytics, and market driven measures of success will invariably lead to consolidation, scaling, and efficiencies that encourage the dehumanizing of publishing as an industry. Without attentiveness to the humanity of knowledge making, the promise and potential of academic knowledge will remain subservient to the vagaries of markets and the commercialization and commodification of labor and life.

As a challenge to this plan, Moore proposes the development of a model of publishing that does not simply reify the current market-driven framework for knowledge making. Instead, he proposes that a model of a commons, managed by commoners, through a collective commitment to commoning might be a way to prioritize care in the process of knowledge making. This he contends that this emphasis on care is not only consistent with academic goals of knowledge making, but also with the ethical labor practices, our commitment to disseminating knowledge freely, and desire to innovate through new forms of social and intellectual relationships grounded in partnerships and collaboration.

This book offered an inspiring new model for understanding academic publishing. It neither purports to nor offers all the answers, in large part because it understands that managing the commons, even with a mandate of care, will invariably produce as many questions and problems as answers and solutions. Commoning is messy, complicated, and open ended. It will likely involve conflict and disagreements, but also cooperation and shared commitments.

Practically, this means that scholar-led publishing will always reflect a plurality of practices and this will encourage scholar-led publishers to “scale small” and resist the kind of efficiencies that can lead for-profit publishers to dehumanize their process. (This is particularly interesting to me especially as academic scholarship is increasingly prepared not only for human readers, but also for automated aggregators and summarizers powered by AI, LLM [large language model] algorithms).  

It is also entirely consistent with notions of conviviality and convivial practices. For Ivan Illich, convivial practices and tools center on the capacity to build communities, while also respecting the individual. Moore’s understanding of the commons depends upon the notion of commoning which has affinities of Illich’s notion of convivial practices. Moore’s work, however, makes explicit the good of the commons and ties that to not only process, but also the work of the commoner. And this explicit statement of responsibility transforms conviviality from something that just happens when likeminded individuals find common cause, but because commoners do the work to make the commons happen.