On Christmas day, we had a quiet time this year. One of the things I did was to read Moore, Samuel A., Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (University of Michigan Press, 2025). This is a most enjoyable book that outlines a project and worldview that I know Sam has been cultivating and refining for many years. I should stress that I am not writing a “review” here. I would be conflicted anyway as I am thanked in the acknowledgements. But it did, like all good books, make me think and I wanted to jot down some thoughts. These thoughts are not necessarily novel – sometimes Sam even explores some of them in the book – but I thought it would be enjoyable to express them nonetheless.

One of these came from a single sentence on page 92. When describing Harney and Moten, Moore writes that “this means accepting the liberal, individualistic, enlightenment nature of the university”. So much seems bound up with this problem. Moore advocates for enclaves that work democratically and cooperatively within those structures, but the constant wall against which liberationary projects keep butting their heads. The main source of manuscripts, authors, editors, copyeditors, reviewers, etc. is the contemporary university. I suppose the question that arises for me is: this book is about publishing, although it tackles issues of research assessment reform and notes that we can never fully separate publishing liberation from the conventions of the university. Could such enclave, commons-like structures exist in higher education itself, starting the reform there rather than in publishing? Or is there something special about academic publishing that allows for these types of experiments because they are somehow safely in an interstitial zone? As the types of project that Moore calls for “require financial support” (p 94) and the entity most likely to give it is a university, we need new structures of labour to emerge in the academy, also.

Moore also talks a lot about ownership. The mode of commons about which he is thinking is not one that is a pool of owned resources that nonetheless have licenses on them to allow for broad reuse and dissemination. However, the thing that I kept thinking was about the question of what ownership means in terms of a piece of writing. Fundamentally, I think that this boils down to the authorship claim. After all, authorship is used to allow promotion and job hiring panels to select candidates. It is used when something goes wrong to sanction the individual in question. There is indisputably in our cultures a very strong tie between who writes something and feeling an ownership of that text. You can see the strength of this feeling in the arguments against LLM training (“they stole my work”) that have emerged recently.

And so the prospect that kept recurring to me as I read was whether it might be possible to totally erase authorship. What would a system of academic publishing look like if all traces of who wrote something were completely removed before it entered the scholarly record? This would have a huge affective consequence for those writing. For certain, having one’s name appear on the thing you have written is partially the point that motivates many people. But a lot of what Moore said made me wonder whether in specific academic publishing circles a lot of harm comes from this system of authorship attribution. Such a prospect will probably horrify many people but I don’t think you need to worry. There is no way that such a system would gain widespread acceptance and very little way in which it could be implemented.

The other point about which I felt uneasy in the book was an aspect that Moore covered himself. One of the presses that he interviewed noted that they have to use Amazon to print and sell their books. They are locked into a commercial market-bound relationship with the world’s wealthiest retailer. This seems, in many way, a slight compromise from the start. But the question then becomes, “how much do you do yourself?” There is a constant division of labour here in which certain functions are undertaken by certain people with specific skill sets. But it is still possible for these enclaves of commons to subcontract work to external providers. Hence, I thought it interesting when Moore listed the functions of a particular publisher, noting that there are roles of authors, editors, reviewers, typesetters, copy editors, proofreaders, and so on, that all function as divisions of labour. At OLH, we do not have the capacity to pay someone in-house for typesetting, for example, so we outsource this to an excellent company called Silicon Chips. Does that mean that we are always already pre-compromised because we entered into a market transaction? I don’t know, but I do know that when we first started OLH via the journal Orbit, I was typesetting things in JATS XML myself and it was incredibly slow and painful because I had no tooling to do so and no expertise in this area.

I also questioned the role of standards in this book. Moore notes that part of the scaling of neoliberal massive corporate publishing involves a harmonization via standards. This allows for scale and interoperability without careful attention to every single article and its integration. However, I feel that standards or at least technical standards go further than being limited to Big Publishing. Certainly, there are ways in which the big commercial players have designed standards to be so difficult to implement, requiring such an overhead to get right, that smaller publishers are locked out of the market because they “can’t do it right”. But some standards have real value for the interoperability of systems. If we have the islands of commons-based projects that Moore envisages, we need glue that sticks them together to make “scaling small” a reality. Standards are the only way to do this but they also come with the limitation of coercing material and digital forms into predefined types.

Interestingly also, for a final thought, there was no reference, as far as I could see, to digital preservation in this book. It was noted that some presses are set up as experimental, ephemeral, transient and so on, but is it valid that these things should have no record ever because they vanished, because they did not adopt standards, because they were experimental, etc.? Our epistemology requires that scholarship make reference to that which has gone before. How do we make such a reference if the things that we wish to reference have disappeared? What could we do to build preservation islands, if that’s what we want to do, around these networked commons?z

References

• 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)