The Politics of Publishing: Access, Ownership, and Control

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_64How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Open access; cognitive capitalism; copyleft; bibliodiversity; Marxism

Abstract

The twenty-first century has brought to the fore profound changes in scholarly communication, largely the result of the open access movement, which seeks to eliminate the economic, legal and technological barriers to the dissemination of knowledge. Open access is a mounting effort to imagine research not merely as a commodity but as a socially produced product which corresponds to Marxist critiques of intellectual property and the phenomenon of cognitive capitalism. Knowledge production, in this sense, is inherently a collective activity, yet the modern publishing phenomenon reproduces inequalities arising from paywalls and author processing charges favouring North and other institutions with adequate resources, while scholars from the Global South are marginalised. The practice of copyleft and commons-based peer production indicate positive interventions to be made, which show how knowledge may still consist in the process of its creation and dissemination outside the confines of the market structures in which it is usually situated. These models reclaim the social character of intellectual production by using existing legal structures in order to secure common freedoms, which echo Marx’s vision of collective production. The principle of bibliodiversity shows the structural necessity of this decolonisation of scholarly communication of necessity requiring institutional plasticity, in order to accommodate the various epistemic communities. Nevertheless open access is perhaps neither normatively neutral nor consciously liberating, but is entangled in algorithmic, institutional and commercial networks. The present study will, therefore, locate open access within these intersecting discourses, maintaining that its promise for transformation lies not merely in the technicalities of its implementation, but in the active reconceptualisation of the production and dissemination of knowledge for collective benefit.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ayushman Devraj
AU  - Prabuddha Ghosh
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - The Politics of Publishing: Access, Ownership, and Control
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Social Management (ICSSSM-2 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1051
EP  - 1068
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_64
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_64
ID  - Devraj2025
ER  -