I must say that I was very grateful to have been requested to review this piece. For many reasons, but two stand out the most. First, this review was an invitation to position myself, dialogue, and discuss with a line of thought grounded in a humanist tradition of scholarship and interpretation I have not so often engaged with. Although somehow challenging, it was a great opportunity to detect some of my underlying assumptions and explore new perspectives on one of the objects central to my own research, namely, open access publishing and the different types of relationships researchers can have with the notion of openness in the context of open science. Second, and building on top of the first one, I was grateful for this thought-provoking and refreshing argument about experimental publishing but also with the thoughtful and well-crafted exchange that followed.

To some point, this position of mine permitted me to see with fresh eyes a long-standing and well-grounded discussion on Open Access and Publishing Activism, which required me to lay out a bit of my background and positionality. That position being the one of a Global South, Latin-American-trained sociologist with a particular interest in Science and Technology Studies, devoted to understanding the connection between scientific texts and the socio-technical arrangements that hold them together and provide them with a specific form and shape. With my experience being more oriented to disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences, much of my comments came from that experience and mindset. Still, and even if many of my observations stemmed from this perspective, I encountered a welcoming and genuine interest in dialogue, something that I found incredibly stimulating for my own reflections. This is a way of saying that I feel that I leave this review exercise better geared to think about what type of interventions can be devised to enact digital practices that can politically and culturally engage with not just the existing but the potential meanings of ‘open’ in open access and open science. This is something I am deeply grateful for, both to author and editor.

I will now try to summarize my general reaction to the piece, which I organized into four different areas: boundaries and disciplinary standpoints, neoliberalism and the political economy of publishing, coordinates for the discussed projects, and existing constraints for experimental publishing.

In terms of boundaries and disciplinary standpoints, it felt to me that the author had a specific idea of publishing practices in mind. Still, it wasn’t so clear to me what the limits were and how distant the translations could be for this type of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-racist practices disciplinary-wise. When trying to move these notions to other disciplinary contexts outside of humanities, I felt the need for a clearer sense of these boundaries as a way to support a discussion with a broader readership.

As for the second set of commentaries, I wanted to stress the role of publishing practices as embedded in a broader knowledge production regime that regulates the circulation of knowledge in our societies. My assumption was that any experimental practice would be facing a disciplinary space that exists and persists in the institutional design of higher education institutions, research funders, evaluation schemes, and all sorts of regime-based regulations. I argued that privatization of knowledge and neoliberal restructuring of universities is a problem that tends not to be evenly distributed throughout the global research landscape. Here, I asked the author how to go beyond idealistic universal, ungrounded, and a-historical subjects for these conversations and how to think of it in connection to real-life publishing practices. The response to this was a thought-provoking argument in favor of the experiments with rewriting and republishing presented in the article as a way of grounding and reimagining publishing conditions.

A third dimension of my comments was directed to what I referred to in our exchanges as ‘spatio-temporal coordinates for the discussed projects.’ This was a way of asking about the modes of existence of these projects, the communities that hold them together through production, and an invitation to think about engagement and readership. I was interested in understanding how the anti-racist and postcolonial lenses made themselves present in practical ways in the discussed projects.

This went on to reach the discussion of the commons. It feels to me that if we drop the S and focus on reciprocity and mutualism, we can understand that there is a distinction between the public, the private, and the common (I am building here from the work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval in the book Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century). Something can be public, but it becomes common when a community thrives around it. Then, the common is also about co-obligation by those who are engaged in the same activity. So, it is about what is being shared, as much as the duties in common. Then, in my commentaries, I was intrigued about the potential of escaping traditional definitions of publishing-readership relations. I was thinking of the value in connecting an account of the publishing subjects, the publishing collectives, and the readership as something that could bring to the front the participatory nature of these spaces. That not being possible, I felt the text could perhaps be a great opportunity to reflect on these limitations as a way to push a discussion about authorship and what it means to experiment with this notion through collaboration.

Finally, I made a point about the existing constraints on publishing and authorship. I was puzzled about how authorships, prestige, and academic positions tend to be sustained on an individual base and how that can strike as a recurrent limiting factor for experimental publishing. I felt that the text would gain from expanding on how the existing regimes of authorship and ownership relate to the specific institutional spaces, and the initiatives presented could be helpful. The author’s reprisal, recovering the resistance and liberation potential of posthuman practices and imaginaries, was stimulating, as it highlighted the collaborative posthumanist nature of publishing as what has indeed, throughout time, allowed the connection of a constellation of agencies, publishers, and authors to written text in its digital and paper-based forms.