‘Servpub – A Collective Infrastructure to Serve and Publish’ is one of three experimental book pilot projects that we are developing with different teams as part of the Open Book Futures project (OBF). The OBF Experimental Publishing Group supports these projects and develops tailored documentation methods for each pilot to share the challenges, barriers, and opportunities encountered while creating experimental books and the workflows to support them. This documentation aims, first of all, to help the publishers involved in the pilot projects to develop and maintain new workflows for future experimental book publishing projects, as well as to explore how these kinds of books sit within and transform more standardised or established print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation systems. The documentation also serves as a means to share knowledge with other presses, authors, and developers on how to engage with, around, and through experimental book publishing.

In this blog post, we discuss our approach to the documentation of the ‘Servpub’ project by situating the pilot in relation to the contemporary (proprietary) academic publishing landscape. Documentation is, of course, a situated, partial, and performative practice. It is never neutral or straightforward. For example, it involves choices about what to include and what to omit, which inherently shapes how a project is understood and interpreted. Documentation, thus, is constructing reality through the lens of the documentarian – in the case of the Servpub pilot project, Simon Bowie and Rebekka Kiesewetter, the members of the OBF Experimental Publishing Group who lead on developing the documentation strategy in exchange with our main contacts in the pilot team: Winnie Soon, Associate Professor at Slade School of Fine Art UCL and director of the Art and Technology BA programme, and Geoff Cox, Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University (LSBU), the co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at LSBU, and the director of the newly formed Digital x Data Research Centre at LSBU. While Winnie and Geoff are our primary contacts, it must be emphasised that ‘Servpub’ is a highly collaborative project, with a strong focus on flattening hierarchies of effort and attribution to acknowledge the contributions of the entire team.

Thinking about a documentation strategy for ‘Servpub’, Simon and Rebekka faced the question of how to document a project that understands its integral elements – namely the infrastructures that books constitute and are constituted by – in such an expansive way as the ‘Servpub’ project team does? How to document an infrastructure-in-becoming that extends beyond physical (e.g. publishing platforms and tools) and institutional systems (e.g. universities or publishers) to include the social and affective structures involved in creating and publishing books? The latter would include the collaborative dynamics between authors, editors, the publisher, and the platform and tool developers and hosts; the emotional labour involved in navigating the tensions between the different collectives and initiatives participating in the project; or the sense of belonging and trust within the project team and the wider communities they belong and feel accountable to. How can we, in documenting this horizontal, multidimensional, and multi-actor project – branching out, via the pilot project’s main contacts, into diverse activist and grassroots art-tech collectives and initiatives – remain attentive to the different grades and depths of involvement among the academic and non-academic communities collaborating in this project, to their different ways of working, as well as to the activist and academic concerns entangled in this pilot?

From our position as members of the OBF Experimental Publishing Group we share, with all the pilot project members, a critical stance towards the commercial and proprietary systems shaping contemporary research, communication, and publishing. In the following, we want to make some of our considerations and motivations behind the documentation strategy that we have devised for the ‘Servpub’ project visible and legible.

Infrastructural Challenges

With their project, the ‘Servpub’ team wants to intervene into proprietary software solutions provided by profit-oriented companies, which force compliance with pre-set constraints established by those companies limiting technological autonomy and diversity. They aim to do this by setting up an alternative publishing platform and workflow that integrates open, horizontal publishing processes and practices (e.g. writing, editing, peer review, design, print, distribution, hosting) with autonomous, self-managed server infrastructures set-up with technical concerns in mind: for example, a peer-to-peer infrastructure, domain and DNS hosting, and addressing various security concerns around appropriate protection of user data and resilience against cyberattack. These technical concerns are built into the foundation of the project and are addressed through using highly portable Raspberry Pi servers as well as using Tinc VPN for encrypted VPN connections within the infrastructure. The pilot project also contains a book written collaboratively by the involved project partners that reflects its own becoming on the alternative publishing platform. The project thus embeds book publishing in its fuller infrastructural context, while also critically addressing concerns about the way in which proprietary solutions often work through standardisation and along the commercial logic of use and consumption thus inhibiting community-building, open knowledge sharing, experimentation, as well as critical reflection on power asymmetries and exploitative labour within technical infrastructures. 

Similar tendencies are seen in the broader context of academic publishing where capitalist principles – such as the emphasis on standardisation, efficiency, scalability, and profit maximisation – are increasingly integrated into the networks that govern the production, validation, distribution, and reception of scholarly knowledge to enhance the growth and productivity of commercially-driven academic institutions and publishers. For example, large publishing corporations such as Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis use platform-connectivity to strategically leverage their digital journals, platforms such as the editorial, review, and publishing environment F1000 (acquired by Taylor & Francis in 2020), databases such as WoS and Scopus, as well as related quantitative metrics as central to their business models and value propositions (Aspesi & Brandt, 2020; Chen et al., 2020; Kember, 2024). The way universities operationalise this system has reinforced a productivity-driven and competitive framework of academic work where scholarly activities are increasingly oriented towards efficiently achieving measurable outcomes. Under these systemic pressures on academic work, scholars engage with forms of self-regulation that shift the focus away from the subjective, contextual, and interpersonal dimensions of their labour which lack direct quantifiable impact (Kiesewetter, 2024; Magazine & Méndez Cota, 2024). For example, pressure to efficiently produce quantifiable results can drive scholars away from non-utilitarian pursuits like experimentation, creative social interactions with peers, intellectual curiosity, and encourage conformity to research topics and methods that align with what is considered measurable, leading to a devaluation of more subjective, speculative, imaginary, or embodied forms of research (for example, from the arts and humanities as well as from non-disciplinary and non-Western epistemic traditions) (Adema, 2021; Chan et al., 2020; Mboa Nkoudou, 2020). These adaptions for the sake of higher productivity create stress and anxiety among researchers, while also leading to feelings of alienation, loss of meaning and agency in work (Kiesewetter, 2024).

Documenting ‘Servpub’

Documenting this project in all its dimensions, can hence not only be about listing technologies and discussing their usage. Rather, and in keeping with the project, we aim to engage with the practical, conceptual, and philosophical questions of what it means to build, use, and sustain a collaborative, horizontal, and diverse publishing platform as integral to the project documentation. As part of this, we want to capture fragments of the complex interplay of technical, social, and affective factors that contribute to the creation and sharing of knowledges in the context of the ‘Servpub’ project and how they change the way author, editor, reviewer, publisher, and developer communities, as well as their prospective publics, can engage with and around these knowledges.

To respect the diverse communities and initiatives involved in ‘Servpub’, as well as their different ways of relating with and around it, we decided to concentrate on the interfaces, or nodal points, around which activist and academic interests intersect in this pilot project (while being aware that these two realms cannot always be separated). These manifest in the server infrastructure as a platform for technological cooperation and political articulation; the press as facilitator of forms of autonomist thought, practice, and politics; and the book as an embodiment of the collective practical, political, and intellectual engagement of the participants.

Against this background, our documentation will consist of a series of multimedia blog posts. These will feature texts as well as interviews with Winnie Soon, Geoff Cox, and the Minor Compositions publisher Stevphen Shukaitis, who are the main intermediaries between the OBF Experimental Publishing Group and the collectives and initiatives involved in ‘Servpub’. Topically, the blog posts will address the pilot project’s technical and legal dimensions (what software is used and why; what are appropriate licensing models?), its conceptual and political implications (what is an autonomous server and what can it do; or how to perform a publisher’s radical politics regarding collaboration, collectivity, autonomous organising through their infrastructures and workflows?); as well as practical questions that are explored in the project such as: How do editorial process and technical processes intersect? How to integrate ‘Servpub’ (or something similar) into publishers’ existing infrastructures, as well as into their technological, editorial, and publishing workflows? And how do the responsibilities, roles, and practices of authors, editors, peer reviewers, and publishers change through, and with, the expansive perspective on publishing infrastructures that ‘Servpub’ suggests?

Header image by Mara Karagianni.