This is part of a short series of posts on four key Copim concepts: Community-led, Scale, Bibliodiversity and Sustainability. Each post will be linked to the others once it is published.
The following text has been published as a (new) introduction to the republication in OEI #104–105: Organisering!? Rum för kultur: Folkets hus, kulturhus, publiceringspraktiker (2024: 189-202, edited by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg), of the ‘Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production’ article that Janneke Adema and Sam Moore originally published in the journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture in 2021. This article outlines the scaling small concept, which has become one of the guiding principles of the Copim community and the COPIM and Open Book Futures projects. The underneath text introduces the article, the concept of scaling small, and how it has been taken up by the Copim community and by other related groups and organisations. For more on scale and organisation please check out the original Scaling Small article or the OEI collection on Organisation.
Reflections on Organising, Governance, and Scale in Scholarly Publishing
Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore
The article republished in the following pages originally appeared in the journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture in 2021. In this article we reflect on and conceptualise alternative models of organisation that academic presses and publishing projects have been experimenting with over the last decade or so. The transition in academia and scholarly communication to digital forms of research and publishing opened space for the actors in these ecosystems to rethink how various gatekeeping mechanisms had originally been set-up in a print-based environment. Open and digital formats and workflows offered an opportunity to gather around publications differently and with that to speculate on how to organise and govern scholarly communication in alternative ways. This digital transition was a key driver of the growth in the small scholar-, community-, and institutional-led publishing initiatives that we analyse in this article. We believe that the ways in which these presses support each other and work together represents a more equitable and resilient way to organise how we share academic research.
In the article we therefore look at ways in which various organisations, collectives, and consortia within scholarly publishing, from the Radical Open Access Collective to ScholarLed and the COPIM(Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs)project, have started to organise together to promote a common goal: to share scholarly research as widely as possible without paywalls to read and publish. To achieve this goal these organisations both reclaimed and radically reimagined how knowledge is produced and with that provided an alternative to the mode of organisation that had come to dominate the (profit and growth based) development of the academic publishing industry from the last decades of the 20th century onwards: one based on ongoing consolidation, monopolisation, commercialisation, and commodification, with a handful of big commercial conglomerates in competition with each other for market share, while buying up smaller competitors.
Our aim in this article was to showcase, promote, and speculate on the different ways of organising that were being developed within academic publishing, ones not focused on demands for ‘scalability’ and ‘sustainability’ as the only imaginable and valid ways to organise knowledge production. These scalability-based systems, we argue, are sustained by capitalist and extractivist logics based on unbridled competition and growth. Furthermore, they are bolstered by (neo-)colonial systems and infrastructures that were historically developed and continuously remade to encourage further homogenisation and standardisation and to promote epistemic hegemonies, flattening diversity by excluding and pushing out what is different or discrete. We therefore plead in this article for more situated engagements with scholarly publishing that allow (biblio)diverse cultures to thrive, that prioritise care over standardisation and technological efficiency, and that value relationalities based on commoning — the governance of shared resources — and the self-organisation of labour over market and state forms of production. The movement of open access presses and publishing projects that have started to work together and collaborate following these principles, e.g. by forming collectives and co-operatives, is what we have conceptualised through the organisational principle of ‘scaling small’.
As a short preface to the original article we wanted to highlight how the concept of scaling small — but more importantly also the practice it describes — has further developed in the last few years, and how it has been adopted by other projects experimenting with alternative futures for scholarly publishing.
For one, scaling small has become the guiding principle of the COPIM project, and it also comes to the fore very clearly in some of the main infrastructures and communities that came out of this project. These include, first of all, the Open Book Collective, which is a UK charity governed by its members which brings together and strengthens relationships between open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable collective funding for open access books without charging authors, creating a new, mutually supportive ecosystem for the publication of open access books. Secondly, Opening the Future, which is a funding model for open access books that enables legacy publishers to transition to open access publishing through a collective library subscription model. Thirdly, Thoth Open Metadata, an open source metadata management and distribution platform which is designed to assist smaller to medium-sized open access publishers to get their books into the (closed books focused and standards-compliant) book supply chains, something they often struggle with on their own. Fourthly, the Thoth Open Archiving Network, a recently launched community initiative, which similarly helps smaller presses to digitally preserve their books, when they often lack financial and institutional support and technical and staff expertise to do so systematically themselves. And finally, the Experimental Publishing Compendium, which is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. This includes reimagining the relationalities that constitute scholarly book publishing and how academic and publishing labour is organised. The compendium brings together tools, practices, and books to promote the publication of experimental scholarly works.
These open and community-led infrastructures and projects are a practical expression of the scaling small principle. They highlight how small and diverse publishing projects can be collectively supported by working collaboratively across the landscape of scholarly communication, instead of in competition (or merely alongside each other), and by foregrounding community ownership, collective production and horizontal governance of shared infrastructures. These projects then do not have to scale and grow to survive but can expand together with others by establishing and growing supportive networks based on mutual reliance. The scaling small principle has also been further adopted by the Open Book Futures project, the successor of the COPIM project, and by the wider Copim community, which brings together the various organisations, partners, and groups connected to both projects, who in this context foremost think of themselves as a ‘community of communities’ dedicated to the core value of bibliophilia (the love and care for books).
The scaling small principle similarly has played a guiding role in the wider scholar-led publishing community. For example, it has become a key part behind the origin story of the ScholarLed consortium (ScholarLed et al., 2019), and has inspired new presses to join the consortium since we wrote the original ‘Scaling Small’ article. This includes mediastudies.press, who express that they have ‘learned most of what we do from the ScholarLed group, all of it based on a "scaling small" philosophy that imagines growth by value-aligned example. From the moment we got started, our goal was to apply for membership, and then — in the spirit of the collective — to pass on what we've learned ourselves to future members’ (Barnes & Adema, 2021). Founding ScholarLed members punctum books have also highlighted the importance of scaling small under the enduring conditions of capitalist realism, where they state: ‘For us, the rise of small-scale scholar-led OA presses is one such tiny event, one not seeking to overturn platform capitalism but to provide more hospitable conditions for “something else” in a capacity that is manageable precisely because we have no desire, unlike many others in academic publishing — in both the non-profit and commercial sectors alike — to “scale up” (Fradenburg Joy & van Gerven Oei, 2023).’
But the principle has also inspired literary publishing projects, including being instrumental to the next development phase of cita press, an open access, feminist indie press and library publishing public-domain books written by women. Cita press perceive scaling small as an alternative way to build organisational capacity and as part of their 3-year project ‘Scaling Small: Partnerships and Organisations Resilience for cita press’ they aim to bring this into practice, while honouring ‘the principles of decentralization, collective knowledge production, and equitable access to knowledge.’ The journal POP! Public. Open. Participatory has also cited the principle as integral to its becoming. Launched by the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing, POP! is a post-digital, scholar-led open access journal for the public humanities that inherently queries what would happen if economies of scale did not rule scholarly publishing. It defines itself as ‘scaled small’, amongst others by keeping ‘technical and process dependencies minimal’ (Maxwell, 2022). For them it is crucial to highlight that the pursuit of scale does not prioritise care and that scaling and speeding up does not allow one to reflect on and question the forms and operating principles of a journal, which is exactly what POP! aims to do.
Finally, as a concept, scaling small is making headway in the wider publishing studies and book theory discourse, where scholars such as Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti (Barnes & Gatti, 2019), Marcel Knöchelmann (Knöchelmann, 2021), Marcel Wrzesinski (Wrzesinski, 2023), and Christoph Schimmel have used it to describe new publishing models and ways of governance within the field of scholarly communication. For example, Schimmel has referred to the concept to outline the key sociospatial strategies that non-profit publishing initiatives could pursue to ‘create a knowledge commons around open and equitable infrastructures’ (Schimmel, 2023). Similarly, we see clear political connections to and affinity with publishing theorists Nick Thoburn and Nick Thurston’s recent announcement of an open-ended editorial project on ‘minor publishing’. For them minor publishing forms a problem space, a programmatic attempt to reformulate publishing by continuously opening it out and bringing it into relation with changing social conditions or with ‘conditions of social crisis, struggle and upheaval’ (Thoburn & Thurston, 2023: 287). Minor publishing in this context is relentlessly open ‘in form, in duration, in voice’, in relation to that what it encounters (Thoburn & Thurston, 2023: 297). And it is this encounter between social relations and publishing forms that we feel requires a situated approach, an openness to diversity and difference. We hope that the republication of our ‘Scaling Small’ article in the context of this collection will inspire other publishing projects to similarly reflect on how their organisational structures are set-up and how they relate to and are open to encountering other projects and communities in their fields, different publishing forms and formats, and alternative ways of gathering around publications. We hope that this openness to situated forms of collaboration — across difference — will further contribute to the thriving of community-owned and scholar-led publishing.
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