Open Peer Review of Experimental Publishing as Collective Struggle. Providing Imaginaries for Posthumanist Knowledge Production

Dear Janneke,

Thank you for this piece. I really found it thought-provoking and refreshing. I find the argument about experimental publishing very (very!) compelling. So, most of what I am commenting here relates to how engaging I find this idea. I am saying this to compensate for if my comments can come across as fixated with details. I must admit that the way the argument is presented was, to some point, challenging as it seems grounded in a more humanist tradition of scholarship, which perhaps I should pay more attention to in the future.

Along with this, I feel that I should expand on my background for you to be able to make better sense of the comments that I am presenting here. I am a Global South Latin-American-trained sociologist with a special interest in Science and Technology Studies. I have been interested in the past for understanding the connection between scientific texts and the socio-technical arrangements that hold them together and provide them with a specific form and shape. I have experience in working with bibliometric data and reflecting on aggregated trends of publishing practices in social sciences and humanities, but also in other scientific traditions. I have been interested in what are the conditions under which scientific texts are produced and how they bear the traces of these circumstances. This is a way of saying that I have tried to think about publishing practices and understand their sociotechnical making. I am currently working on Open Access and Open Science with a special interest in how this unfolds in Global South and marginalized communities. This is to say that some of my observations can result from my own limitations, so I share them, hoping they would help enlarge the readership for this piece.

I have tried to arrange my comments into different groups to make them easier to refer to. Feel free to react to each however you see fit.

[1] Boundaries and disciplinary standpoint

All along the text, leaning on feminist, postcolonial, and anti-racist scholars, the idea of alternative practices keeps being brought to the center. For instance, some of the critical dimensions where these alternatives are mentioned are:

* Doing scholarship as a way of intervening and deconstructing structures of oppression in everyday academic practices.

* Alternative genealogies of Open Access publishing connecting activism with academic work. Include the communal in writing strategies.

* Property, predatory practices, and citational politics.

* Ways of knowledge production. To create liberatory practices and imaginaries.

It feels to me that there is an opaque definition of the kind of publishing practices being discussed here. Repeatedly, the text uses sciences, knowledge, and scholarship interchangeably. Still, there seems to be a given assumption about what types of knowledges are at stake here. The humanist (or, as proposed, posthumanist) knowledge has been disciplined and normalized in very specific ways. This is very different in other branches of the sciences, like experimental sciences or engineering sciences. It seems that the scope for this critique is not clearly present. Then, when reflecting on the proposed alternatives, it becomes difficult to fully grasp how the proposed alternatives are responding to ongoing practices present in specific branches of the sciences. If inter-discipline and intersectional approaches are central to the posthuman knowledge production discussed in the text, I would like to see some sort of reflection that provides a clearer sense of what are the kinds of knowledges central to this discussion. What is the standpoint for this piece? Making that more clear would help expand the audiences and dialogues that could stem from this work. A reflection on the boundaries and limits would be critical to support a discussion with a broader readership.

[2] Neoliberalism and the political economy of publishing

I like the idea of thinking the publishing practices as embedded in a broader regime of rules and practices that govern how knowledge is produced, accepted, distributed, and disseminated (I am thinking here about the work of Dominique Pestre in the ‘Regimes of Knowledge Production’). Any regime of knowledge production relates to a given set of social regulations, so changes in society transform science’s practices, institutions, and epistemologies. This is easy to showcase when addressed through disciplinary lenses.

I mention this since one could say that Neoliberal publishing institutions are spread throughout the disciplinary spectrum and present in different ways in natural sciences, laboratory sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities. Not that I would like to see the text reproduce disciplinary silos, but I feel in need to some clearer sense of positionality that helps readers to relate to the text and make better sense of it in their own experiential space.

If the text decides to take a political approach – grounded in a postcolonial, anti-racist, and feminist critique – that is great, but I would like to know more about what are the implications when facing a disciplinary space that exists and persists in the institutional design of higher education institutions, research funders, evaluation schemes, and all sort of regime-based regulations. If the privatization of knowledge and neoliberal restructuring of universities is a problem in this context, it shall not be evenly distributed throughout the global research landscape. Perhaps expanding on who is the publishing subject that is central to this reflection could be useful. It feels to me that there is a problem of building an idealistic universal, ungrounded, and a-historical subject for these conversations.

[3] Spatio-temporal coordinates for the discussed projects

Although anti-racist and postcolonial lenses are foundational to the piece, it was hard for me to find how these ideals became grounded in practical ways in the projects (perhaps this is too much of a sociological point to make, so bear with me). I could not find a sound account of how the discussed projects relate to a context and what that context is. It seems to me that ‘Cita’ is a digitally-based endeavor and that ‘Combinatorial Books’ has some sort of grounding through responses to edited books. Still, I would like to know more about the modes of existence of these projects and the communities that hold them together through production, but also engagement and readership.

This goes to 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 that are engaged in the same activity. So, it is about what is being shared as much as the duties in common. Then, I see that there is perhaps some potential for escaping traditional definitions of publishing-readership relations. Connecting an account of the publishing subjects, the publishing collectives, and the readership could set the front for the participatory nature of these spaces. If this is not possible, perhaps reflecting on these limitations could be useful to keep on pushing the discussion about authorship and what it means to experiment with this notion through collaboration.

[4] Experimental publishing, authorship, and existing constraints

This point also relates to regimes (sorry if I seem monothematic!). As said above, I find the idea of action and intervention very compelling, and I agree that there is a performative and interventionist potential for experimental publishing. I sympathize with the aspiration of developing (re)writing strategies that offer alternatives to ongoing appropriation schemes. Still, I feel that the critical examination of research and publishing practices has the challenge of being a highly individualized task. When presenting this kind of argument, it seems critical to me to think about the type of agency that authors and publishers do have in the academic publishing landscape. This can help reflect on what are the limits to overcome and how the burdens of these collective projects are distributed, as well as the rewards.

My point is that authorships, prestige, and academic positions tend to be sustained on an individual base. I see that perhaps expanding on how the existing regimes of author and ownership relate to specific institutional spaces and the initiatives presented could be helpful. It could show what type of conundrums an author has to deal with when trying to lay out an experimental publishing path. Not all authors will decide on doing that, and this is not purely a individual choice but has also structural constraints.

An example of this relates to how authors (at least those pursuing an academic career) think of audiences for their texts. For instance, research is shared for many different audiences that go beyond those that can and will engage with the texts. A clear example of this can be found in research assessment bodies. When we, as researchers, write, we are also thinking about how to sustain and develop our careers forward. Text can be, in that sense, instrumental to many other things than sharing knowledge. Hence, if intervention and activism should break the normalized boundaries for knowledge and provide new imaginaries, how are they going to account for the ever-increasing evaluation instances that lean on texts as a source for their assessments? This does not need to be central to the piece, but I would like it to be acknowledged, as it seems to me that it is critical for any successful intervention. It is the Achilles heel of many collaborative projects that rise, stemming mostly from academic spaces.

On a side note, authorship is also becoming less individual in the context of corporate capture of intellectual production performed by corporation-run large language models. LLMs are also making invisible the work, the value, and all the care put into written pieces. One could mention this as another front where posthuman practices and imaginaries could provide tools for liberation and resistance.

THE REVIEWER

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Dear Matias,

First of all, thank you for this incredibly thoughtful and at the same time very helpful review, which will support me in strengthening the arguments I want to put forward in this article and will help position them more clearly, all of which will be crucial to connect more closely the 3 parts the draft article currently consists of.

I want to start by responding to your first point on the disciplinary standpoint the article takes in (also in relation to the publishing practices it puts forward). I agree that I need to make this clearer in the article itself (I discovered on rereading the article that I currently only mention the context of humanities publishing in a footnote). Yet at the same time there is a reason I perhaps initially didn’t spend too much time on positioning this article, which is due to the specific discursive community it will connect to when published, i.e. Culture Machine, an open access journal of culture and theory that positions itself within a longstanding cultural studies and critical theory tradition, which in many ways forms the situated community for this article.

In addition to that, the article responds in specific to two calls for papers (the initial call for papers on Open Access and Publishing Activism was reformulated for Culture Machine and taken forward under the editorship of Rebekka Kiesewetter as Publishing after Progress) both of which foreground a specific discursive tradition to which they have invited responses. For example, the initial call for papers formulate this as follows: ‘this special issue calls on contributions that document and reflect on the emergence of critical and experimental practices in publishing and digital posthumanities which have a feminist orientation and commitment to intervene in political and cultural debates on open access and open science.’ Yet of course, responding to this specific invitation by this discursive community, doesn’t mean the article will only be of use or relevant to this community, nor that it necessarily only positions itself in relation to this community (which I will come back to in a bit). And hence I agree with your critique that to make this relevant to, connect it to, and open it out to a potential wider readership, this connection could be made more explicit. You write that ‘Repeatedly, the text uses sciences, knowledge, and scholarship interchangeably.’ This is true, but this is again also partly intentional, as the article draws on feminist and decolonial theorists that work across a wide array of disciplines (e.g. critical decolonial/postcolonial feminism, cultural studies, social geography, law, philosophy, critical race studies, and of course debates on open access publishing) and they again draw on and highlight different disciplinary aspects within scholarly communication (as a form of critique, inspiration, reflection, warning, speculation etc.). My aim here is not to draw these thinkers into an established framework from which I am writing, but to respect these conceptualisations and phrasings, and the ways in which they work in their own specific discursive contexts. Where possible though, I will try and make it more evident that these positionings relate to the theorists I am engaging with.

In relation to your question on neoliberalism and the political economy of publishing, you refer to some of the aspects I and others working on radical and critical open access publishing have been exploring and critiquing in various related and less related contexts (around the neoliberal university, the commercialisation of publishing, metrics and assessment systems etc.), and indeed these contexts are always crucial to unravel more in depth in order to make impactful interventions. However, where activism in the field of open access publishing has often taken the form of a critique of the institutions of knowledge production, the argument I want to make in this article is that experimental publishing practices, as I have tried to position them in relation to the theorists mentioned above, should be seen as similar, important, activist interventions and forms of critique. With this I want to argue that experimental publishing, by creating new imaginaries for the kinds of publishing forms and relationalities that could potentially be more ethical and critical, should be perceived as an inherently activist practice. Yet its experimental and speculative nature does mean that indeed there is to some extend always an ’idealistic universal and ungrounded’ subject it is responding to, as the publishing subject, which in many ways has been fully conditioned by our print based publishing conditions (as I have outlined more fully in my monograph Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities) will similarly need to be reimagined for a potential posthumanities future (as more integrally connected to and embedded in the material forms through which we communicate our research, for example). At the same time, in saying this, I think this subject is again grounded (or cut down) in and through the specific practical experiments with rewriting and republishing that I also focus on in the article.

In relation to your question on how the conceptual anti-racist and decolonial practices practically work through in the publishing projects I discuss, I fully agree with your point here, and this is the main thing I still need to work on for the final version of the article, the early draft that you have read is still too much presenting the theory and discussed projects as separate, and my focus in rewriting this article will exactly focus on how they expand these concepts of rewriting and republishing through their publishing practices, and how this relates to the more political and speculative arguments I am making in the remainder of the article. I have a somewhat clearer idea of how I will be doing this, but I won’t be able to reflect on it more thoroughly at this point, but perhaps I can come back to this once I have completed the article and finished this stage of rewriting. My focus here will definitely be more of a media-material one though (seeing the text as an inherent agency within a posthuman framework, so it is less focused on the relationships around the text – although those are of course crucial too – and more on the crucial agency that is performed by the text, and by material publishing practices within that wider agential setting of knowledge production). Similarly, my focus in showcasing these fantastic projects is perhaps less about outlining the projects as such, and more about the experimental practices that they showcase (as these projects, and the communities they are embedded in, do many many things beyond them). Yet at the same time I agree that the relationalities that are forged around these projects and the communities that sustain them are in the context of this article crucial, yet what both projects try to do is extend the idea of who and what that community is or is commonly perceived to be within humanities publishing, e.g. beyond the reader and the author towards the wider materiality and agency of texts and the communities that support this interconnected network of texts. Here the practices of rewriting and republishing extend and break through our understanding of what we see as being in common within academic publishing, and this is very much something I am interested in exploring more in depth.

In relation to what you write about publishing and how any (or most) intervention(s) into this remains a highly individual task – although I don’t disagree with this argument, at the same time the experimental practices I highlight in this article are trying to, as you write, function as ‘posthuman practices and imaginaries [that] could provide tools for liberation and resistance’ by highlighting how publishing has always been a collaborative posthumanist practice that involved different constellations of agencies, from publishers, to authors, to ink, and digital infrastructures. Highlighting this inherently communal aspect of publishing more, instead of highlighting the supposed individual proprietary original author of a text, could be one way of starting to counteract this focus on individual objects and authors, which can take the form of more clearly acknowledging the different agencies involved in the production of a book or text, extending the authorial function, but also by contesting the authorial role through for example collective or anonymous forms of authorship. Similarly processual forms of publishing (which would include the rewriting practices I describe in the article) have the potential to question and intervene in the output-focused scholarly communication system and political economy of publishing. This again asks us to question where the difference between research and publishing lies and when and why we decide to cut this down/distinguish it, or it is cut down for us, and for what reasons (for promotion, communication, evaluation etc.). These are exactly the kind of questions experimental publishing practices try to address and, as I hope to argue in the article, this is exactly where their activist potential lies.

THE AUTHOR