Janneke Adema and Sam Moore, in one of the very best scholarly articles on academic publishing I’ve read in a long time:
[I]f you give scholars (for example) one day of unstructured autonomous time a week to work on scholar led publishing projects, a burgeoning, community-controlled ecosystem of publishing projects could flourish. They could, as we have identified in the piece, work together jointly and in new kinds of collectivity, foregrounding an ethic of care for publishing over a commercial logic of choice. This, we hope, would encourage others to do likewise by redirecting the work they do for commercial actors towards in-house alternatives.
Those are the last few lines of the piece, published as part of new formations’s “Public Knowledge” issue. Adema and Moore make the case for folding scholar-led publishing into academic work, as a way to reclaim publishing for the academy and—crucially—to help the university live up to its own (purported) values. They position their idea as a “utopian demand” (borrowing from Kathi Weeks): it “asks us to imagine alternative futures for work, while at the same time being performative, where the demand itself prefigures a different world.”