Preface

Foregrounding the Social and Affective Life of Open Access Publishing

Experimental Publishing Group (Open Book Futures)

Since 2019, the Copim community – a network of scholars, open access publishers, librarians, infrastructure providers, and others interested in building a more equitable and diverse ecosystem for scholarly publishing – has developed and sustained new infrastructures for open access (OA) book publishing. Through the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (2019–2023) and the Open Book Futures (OBF) project (2023–2026), they have created and maintained cooperative organisations, non-for-profit funding models, and decentralised systems that support community-led OA publishing.

As part of this, the OBF Experimental Publishing Group – within a number of experimental book pilot projects – has supported authors, publishers, and developers to experiment with the forms, formats, practices, processes, and relationalities of OA monograph publishing in the humanities beyond single-authored, print-based models.

Besides providing editorial, technical, and conceptual support, during OBF, the Experimental Publishing Group took on a grant-giving role, offering small amounts of funding to three pilot projects selected via an open call, among them "ServPub – An Infrastructure to Serve and Publish" resulting in this book. Crucially, this experiment in funding was itself conceived as part of the research process: The aim was to create space for participating groups to define what was meaningful and relevant to them. Beyond minimal baseline requirements aligned with OBF’s values – such as the use of open-source tools, the implementation of Diamond OA, and open documentation – we prioritised community agency over directing experimentation.

We see this work as important because many scholars lack the support, time, and energy to explore alternative publishing models (within or beyond OA publishing) – even when they are aware of the limitations of prevailing systems and express a desire to work differently. The para-academic and non-academic communities involved in this book face parallel constraints that take the form of precarity, unpaid labour, and chronic infrastructural under-resourcing. In the academic sphere specifically, these pressures are intensified by an environment in which prestige is, as Aileen Fyfe et al. note, increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large commercial publishers who have expanded and centralised control over editorial systems, peer-review governance, proprietary submission platforms, and citation-based metrics. These components are now marketed to neoliberal research institutions as value-added services promising more efficient management of scholarship. In doing so, they reproduce prestige economies that equate scholarly value with citation counts, journal rankings, and high-volume publishing. Within this entanglement of institutional priorities and commercial publishing agendas, some research institutions, policy providers, and funding bodies have begun embedding specific, funders- and policy-driven versions of OA publishing into frameworks of research evaluation and funding eligibility. In these contexts, openness is enacted as a static, top-down mandate – a compliance checkbox within a bureaucratic apparatus of performance metrics. As a result, mandated forms of OA become directly tied to institutional and individual competitiveness, positioned as a prerequisite for securing funding, increasing visibility, and sustaining advantage within performance-based environments. For many arts, humanities, and social science scholars, this means OA publishing is experienced less as a political or ethical choice and more as an administrative obligation, tightly entangled with prestige metrics such as citation counts and journal rankings.

As Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore note, publishing labour is increasingly caught between "unmeasurable service work and metricised performance targets … affective, open-ended, collegiate labour, while also being quantified and monitored as anxiety-inducing performance management." Under pressure to produce work that is legible to evaluative systems – publishable, citable, and easily measured – arts, humanities, and social science scholars around the globe increasingly adjust their scholarly practices to fit dominant publishing norms and the English-language, high-ranking, journal-centred outputs privileged by evaluation systems as the most visible, citable, and professionally rewarded. This evolution narrows methodological, epistemic, and procedural possibilities: scholars favour more linear and generalisable modes of argumentation; scale back speculative, emergent, or relational forms of inquiry; strategically shift to writing in English; and redirect the social and collaborative practices that underpin research into activities aimed at visibility, networking, or strategic career advancement. These dynamics reinforce prestige economies that devalue subjective, embodied, community-rooted, and non-Western forms of knowledge, while also producing dissonance between scholars' intellectual and ethical commitments and the narrow forms of value recognised by institutions. The resulting stress and alienation are unevenly distributed, putting more pressure on early-career researchers, women, scholars of colour, queer scholars, and neurodiverse or disabled researchers.

While there has been growing attention to how these pressures shape the relational and emotional experience of academic life, in infrastructure work the social and affective dimension has remained under-acknowledged. Conversations about publishing infrastructures still tend to prioritise technical, administrative, or policy-driven concerns, leaving the emotional, relational, and care-based aspects of infrastructuring largely invisible. This has also been true for much of the Copim community’s work – designing new organisational models, outlining governance structures, and developing and documenting software.

As Susan Leigh Star famously observed, infrastructure is often invisibilised: "People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates – railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand." This remains true in scholarly publishing, where infrastructure tends to recede into the background and becomes visible primarily through breakdown. Even when addressed directly, it is frequently represented through technical diagrams or system maps that foreground components and processes rather than the human relationships, social practices, and emotional engagements through which infrastructures actually function, endure, or falter.

Against this background, ServPub’s emphasis on social and affective dimensions offered a vital complement to this largely technical imaginary of infrastructure in scholarly publishing practice and research – and productively widened the Copim community’s own infrastructural horizon towards a more holistic understanding of how publishing systems are configured and sustained in practice.

This is consonant with more recent ethnographic and critical work that reorients attention toward the practice of infrastructuring and the relational labour it entails. Calkins and Rottenburg describe infrastructures as "experimental material-semiotic practices interweaving social, economic, political, and legal orderings with moral reasoning and technical networks that inevitably produce new and unpredictable assemblages that reconfigure the world." This framing foregrounds infrastructure as situated, contingent, and affectively charged – shaped less by its technical components than by the social relations that hold it together.

Joe Deville has extended this perspective by analysing how affect is entangled in the infrastructuring of scholarly publishing and arguing that OA publishing infrastructures are situated and affectively mediating interventions, and that attending to affects such as hope, disappointment, and optimism is vital for materialising more equitable publishing futures. Julien McHardy similarly notes that "love is our business model": an insistence that attachment, ethical commitment, relational accountability, and collegial solidarity are not antithetical to publishing but central to sustaining non-extractive, community-led infrastructures that resist the ‘cold’ bureaucratic logics governing much of the contemporary publishing landscape.

This orientation towards the social and affective dimensions of infrastructuring also sits in close conversation with wider interventions in the field of OA publishing, to which the Experimental Publishing Group is intellectually, politically, and practically indebted: Across the histories of OA publishing, advocates have challenged prevalent – for example, funder- and policy-mandated – approaches that equate openness with the mere removal of technological, economic, or legal barriers to research outputs. Drawing on relational worldviews such as buen vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in Africa, and the work of theorists such as Arjun Appadurai and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, some scholars argue that OA publishing must instead be understood as a plural, contested practice grounded in epistemic justice: questioning whose knowledge counts and who is authorised to speak. Others, on the basis of Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism and Étienne Balibar’s conception of democratisation as an ongoing and conflictual process, conceptualise OA as something sustained through disagreement, experimentation, and reflexivity rather than achieved through the removal of technical access barriers alone. Still others locate the transformative potential of OA publishing in activist publishing traditions rooted in anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and labour movements. These include the Combahee River Collective, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Precarias a la Deriva, and Cita Press – initiatives that practise collaborative publishing as a form of resistance to dominant white, Western, patriarchal, and capitalist epistemologies.

Building on these interventions, OA publishing has been framed as a doing, "less a project and model to be implemented, and more a process of continuous struggle and critical resistance"; "an entry point to intervene into the hegemonic system of traditional scientific knowledge"; "a way to dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do"; or an "undoing of scholarship," a sustained effort to deconstruct the everyday operations of classed, gendered, and racialised power within academic processes. Other formulations emphasise OA publishing as a refusal of the "spirit of competition and individualism" and the cultivation of "friendship and cooperation" in editorial and publishing practices. Still others position OA as an opportunity to rethink research cultures themselves by enabling bottom-up critical discourses and collaborative infrastructures in response to the top-down corporatisation of university life.

Taken together, these strands of work – of which ServPub offers a situated, infrastructural expression – reorient OA publishing towards the social, epistemic, and affective conditions through which knowledge is created, validated, and shared. In doing so, they reshape the very notion of openness on which it relies. As Adema argues, doing OA involves cultivating "forms of openness that do not simply repeat established forms… or succumb to the closures" produced by the institutionalisation of OA – such as its codification into policy mandates and compliance checklists, as discussed earlier. In this way OA publishing opens space "for reimagining what counts as scholarship and research… what an author, a text, and a work actually is." Similarly, Denisse Albornoz, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan call for an understanding of openness grounded in political engagement, community participation, and the collective imagination of "futures radically different from the present".

The ServPub project contributes to these reorientations of OA publishing by demonstrating how they can be enacted within the practical work of infrastructuring. The team’s emphasis on non-extractive collaboration resonates strongly with the traditions outlined above which understand OA publishing not as the removal of access barriers alone, but as a situated, justice-oriented, and epistemically accountable practice. In conversations for our documentation of the project, a member of In-grid referred to the project as "a social project" and said that "acknowledging the social aspects of it is as important as it being a technical experiment." The infrastructuring has been first and foremost a collective practice of bringing together a web of interdependencies, alliances, and the values of resisting corporate hegemony in publishing. In this context, in our conversations with the team, non-extraction emerged as a practised form of infrastructuring, sustained through reciprocity, shared responsibility, and mutual care across differently positioned contributors. As Systerserver put it, "we are always working with limited resources, so the question becomes how we can share those to compensate each other with time, knowledge, and effort." Such work requires acknowledging how collaborators are situated within extractive systems, and how these systems distribute privilege and precarity unevenly. Many participants – including those employed in UK higher education – operate under shared conditions of precarity, making it crucial to attend to how power, recognition, and vulnerability circulate and shift across institutional and non-institutional settings. As In-grid noted, "in the context of 'ServPub' it has been important to acknowledge the differences in privilege between groups... alongside moving funding around and trying to repurpose it toward those without access." Participants also stressed the importance of attending to non-material and relational forms of labour. As noNames observed, this includes recognising and crediting work already undertaken by others – particularly in contexts where academic actors have historically drawn on community knowledge without acknowledgement. ServPub has made these contributions visible through, for instance, its "Infrastructure Colophon", which documents community labour, tools, and situated expertise as part of the infrastructure itself.

Through this focus, ServPub foregrounds the social and affective labour through which publishing infrastructures actually function, and insists that these dimensions must be treated as consequential rather than peripheral. Doing so requires redistributing decision-making power, recognition, and resources in ways that make relational, collaborative, and reciprocal forms of work structurally significant rather than merely supplementary. This, in turn, demands rethinking what publishing infrastructures are for and how they are organised: redesigning workflows – from peer review and editorial labour to technical maintenance, documentation, and credit attribution – so that they sustain relations of mutual support, epistemic accountability, and non-extraction. In this sense, ServPub shows that OA publishing is not merely about making content available, but about cultivating forms of openness that centre the social, epistemic, and infrastructural conditions through which knowledge is produced, validated, and shared, and that transform how power circulates across these sites. This book offers a practical and situated insight into how such commitments can be enacted in day-to-day infrastructuring work.