Beyond Access: Publishing as Infrastructural Experimentation

Below is my response to comments from Stevphen Shukaitus and Simon Batterbury made on the Radical Open Access mailing list in October 2026. Stevphen and Simon were reponding to a July 9 issue of the Open Humaniites newsletter titled 'Who Will Find Us?: What Happens to Open Access After Search?'

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Thanks Stevphen and Simon for the thoughtful and generous responses. I guess with that newsletter we were trying to get ahead of things when it comes to thinking through the implications of the shift from search engines to AI chatbots, rather than just letting things happen to us. But the question of what kinds of intellectual and social relationships we want publishing to make possible is also a good starting point for thinking further about all this. 

Speaking of social and human costs, I do worry about how much longer there will be enough people around who are willing and able to have such encounters, sustain such social relationships, participate in such communities of study and collective intellectual production, and bring new projects into being. As we know, large numbers of scholars are leaving the mainstream university system as a result of 'restructuring' (for which we can read the 'hollowing out' of critical subjects in the humanities and social sciences). In the UK, 'nearly 4,000 academic posts in social sciences, humanities and the arts have been axed in one year alone. In the 12 months to December 2024, just under 3,000 social sciences, 820 humanities and 240 arts jobs went. All but 110 were in non-Russell Group universities, reducing student choice and potentially exacerbating inequalities' (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/14/university-job-cuts-humanities-social-sciences). The number of early-career humanities staff has fallen by 20% over the last decade (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/humanities-hardest-hit-early-career-opportunities-disappear).

As a result, many early-career scholars are choosing not to remain in - or even to enter - the university system as researchers or lecturers: because they're seeing it as unattractive, precarious, individualised, conservative, hypercompetitive - in short, toxic.

Of those who do remain in the university, many are overworked - not least because they're having to take on the work of colleagues they've lost. They simply don't have the 'time, spaces  or capacities' to devote to such communities: to 'editing, organising, facilitating, maintaining relationships, caring for spaces' and so on. 

Because of the pressures of academic employment, promotion and evaluation, other early-career scholars apparently feel they have to echo what those in older generations who have achieved high-status do and say. They almost deliberately bland themselves out (consciously or unconsciously), continuing to operate much as such legacy academics did. So, yes, as Simon says, many are concerned with getting 'a standard article out so that they can obtain a job or advance their career', rather than with who is producing knowledge, experimenting with infrastructure and the 'social infrastructures of publishing', or setting up their own publishing projects. 

(Speaking of bringing new projects into being and encouraging a proliferation of experiments: to what extent are early-career scholars starting new open access academic presses these days, does anyone know? Or is this an activity that pretty much belongs to previous generations, with scholars today more likely to be interested in publishing on Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube and forming communities by running book clubs and hosting in-person events? After all, both Open Humanities Press and Minor Compositions are nearly 20 years old now, having been launched within a year of each other. Was there something in the air in 2008/2009 that isn't in the air so much now?)

As a result of all this, there's a real process of re-centering underway, one that goes beyond 'the infrastructures of academic publishing [becoming] increasingly concentrated in the hands of commercial interests', as Stevphen puts it, and that's moving in the opposite direction to which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (an original board member of OHP) directs us in Moving the Centre when he writes: 

I am concerned with moving the centre in two senses at least. One is the need to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world…. The second sense is … to move the centre from all minority class establishments within nations to the real creative centres among the working people in condition of gender, racial and religious equality.

According to Andy Burnham, we're supposed to have reached the end of the neoliberal project in the UK. (Is this what the situation with Manchester City signals? It'd be nice to think so.) Yet there seems to be no sign of this message having reached the people who lead and manage universities. Although maybe their jobs, too, are going to be 'restructured' - ironically enough, thanks to AI (https://openhumanities.substack.com/p/the-end-of-management-two-new-books). 

In the meantime, I'm wondering what we can do to push back against the current direction of travel toward such re-centering? How do we support colleagues, both inside and outside the university, to be part of such communities of study and intellectual production - or to develop their own versions of them, including some that do indeed 'go beyond the conventional boundaries of what we think publishing involves'? What different arrangements, socially, organisationally, infrastructurally and economically, do they need for these activities to be possible for them?