Antagonize This! The Empty Signification of “Academy-Owned” Publishing in the Neoliberal University

“The governmental structure of the nation-state is no longer the organizing center of the common existence of peoples across the planet, and the University of Excellence serves nothing other than itself, another corporation in a world of transnationally exchanged capital.”—Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

In a 2023 opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing,”1 Sarah Kember and Amy Brand formulate a variation of the “horseshoe theory,”2 which argues that the far left and far right, rather than being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, are in fact closely aligned. With respect to open access (OA) publishing and what has supposedly gone wrong (its hyper-commercialization), they argue that, at one extreme, there are rapaciously capitalist mega-publishers milking authors and institutions by charging exorbitant fees for OA publications, while at the other extreme, we have a supposedly gullible “grass-roots and often scholar-led movement” that, despite its civic values and its investments in non-profit, community-led forms of public knowledge, “effectively endorsed” the “neoliberal framework” of the former. Kember and Brand believe this to be the case because OA advocates have become too “ideological,” espousing “a simplistic belief in openness at any cost” that corporate-conglomerate publishers have taken advantage of. In addition, they claim that questions “about academic freedom, widening inequality, the impact on smaller publishers, and the applicability of science-based policy for the arts, social sciences, and humanities have long been overlooked in conversations about open access.”3

In her 2024 essay in Culture Machine, Kember goes further and writes that, “Open access is a form of accelerationism which demonstrates that it cannot function strategically, that it can be coercive in its alignment with technocratic power, but not interventional in the face of technocratic power.”4 In Kember’s view, there is not enough “antagonism” in OA publishing, especially to various forms of neoliberal technocracy. As she states it, “The possibility of antagonism—the prerequisite for politics—is latent in the new scholarly publishing landscape consisting of new university and scholar-led presses,” but they ultimately do not make good on it because of their investments, again, in “openness at any cost.” In their jointly authored essay, Kember and Brand ultimately propose that the “undervalued middle ground of nonprofit or fair-profit university-press publishing, mission-aligned with the academy,” which Kember (Goldsmiths Press) and Brand (MIT Press) represent, would provide a sensible “middle ground” for “equitable access to knowledge” and thus these “are the publishers that universities should protect, invest in, and make deals with.”5

To argue their point, Kember and Brand provide an oversimplified image of what is, in fact, a much more complex and longer history of OA, situating its supposedly single origin in the “self-archiving practices” of scientific communities in the 1990s (what we now call Green OA6), which Kember and Brand link to a vaguely articulated “Californian Ideology” representing an unholy alliance between “Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism” and “the free spirit of hippie culture.”7 All digs at hippies and California aside, Kember and Brand present a history of OA that bypasses, among other signature movements and events, the history of the Situationist International, public knowledge infrastructures developed in Latin America, Indonesia, and Africa, and the scholarly communication practices of the former Eastern Bloc.8 One could even make the case that early efforts to translate the Bible into English from the late 1300s through the 1600s were a proto-OA hacktivist movement, and that very case has been cogently argued in Kathleen Kennedy’s book Medieval Hackers.9 There is no one history of OA, but, rather, there are multiple histories, none of them complete, none of them totalizing, as Kember and Brand’s essay would have us believe. Moreover, you will be hard pressed to find anyone in the non-profit OA sector who has argued for openness “at any cost” (what would that even look like? would death squads be involved?) and most in the landscape of non-profit OA publishing are more than well aware and highly critical of the neoliberal technocracy that has dominated academic publishing—long before OA became the norm, we might add.

Kember and Brand present their one-dimensional, Anglo-American caricature of the OA movement in order to position themselves as the better guardians of OA academic publishing against the scholar-led ideologues and malfeasant commercial behemoths that, as Brand states in another essay, jointly “undermined” the “academy-controlled framework” of scholarly communications.10 The phrase “academy-controlled” here is significant, as is its corollary “academy-owned publishing,” which first appeared (as far as we can tell) in a 2017 blog post on “Red OA,”11 but it garnered a more widespread adoption roundabout 2019.12 We see this terminology as a way for university presses to distinguish themselves from what independent presses such as punctum books have formulated as “scholar-led” publishing. Scholar-led presses are precisely that: presses led by scholars, believing that the means of knowledge production and dissemination should be brought back into the hands of scholars themselves—whether inside or outside the so-called “academy.” And while we, for example, also legally own the press we lead, we specifically eschew the terminology of “ownership,” preferring instead to say that we are community-led, in the sense that we are beholden to and take guidance from our readers, our authors, and the university libraries that fund us. The emergence of scholar-led publishing did not happen in a vacuum, nor was it a group of people who necessarily wanted a hyper-acceleration of OA publishing. For punctum books, at least, it is reactionary. It was about wanting to publish books and authors that we knew university presses would never publish based on our own experiences as academic authors, and thus it was about precisely those things Kember and Brand seem to believe scholar-led presses don’t pay enough attention to: academic freedom and social justice.

Established in the wake of the Radical Open Access Conference at Coventry University in 2018, the presses collaborating in the ScholarLed Foundation have been at the forefront of developing OA books infrastructures (such as Thoth Open Metadata) and also innovative funding models for OA books and infrastructure, such as the Open Book Collective and Opening the Future. OA books initiatives launched by university presses, such as MIT Press’s Direct to Open program, are not as sui generis as is often claimed, but rather follow consortial library funding models developed much earlier by scholar-led and independent publishing initiatives such as Annual Reviews, Knowledge Unlatched, Open Library of Humanities, and Open Book Publishers (Lever Press should also be included as an early university-based innovator in consortial library funding for OA publishing). When MIT Press first announced Direct to Open in 2021 as a “first of its kind sustainable framework for open-access monographs,”13 this bombastic untruth (“first of its kind”?) was really jarring, especially because MIT Press consulted with Raym Crow of Chain Bridge Group to develop their program, the same person who also consulted with Annual Reviews to develop the “subscribe to open” business model they launched in 2017.14 Are they tripping?

Two scholar-led presses from the UK and US, Open Book Publishers and punctum books, respectively, have both existed for well over a decade, publishing hundreds of OA books without imposing fees on authors while also working on collective projects to help other, smaller presses, both independent and university-based, do the same. But somehow we have helped to accelerate the neoliberal hellscape that “undermines” university presses and harms academic freedom. Rather, university presses have consistently excluded scholar-led presses from their OA books pilots and initiatives, despite clear alignments in the author base and the obvious benefits, financial and otherwise, that could be garnered from developing collaborative funding models in which both university presses and scholar-led presses could thrive. Instead, Kember and Brand basically accuse scholar-led presses of reinforcing, by some ironic twist of fate, the neoliberal status quo from which only they can deliver us, which is just one more variation of what has always been the “circle the wagons” approach of university presses, not to mention that they seem unwilling to examine their own institutional privilege as well as the ways in which their institutionally is always already neoliberal.

Kember and Brand’s argument is not only overly simplistic, but rests upon a cause-and-effect fallacy: OA advocates did not naively, nor unwittingly, help to usher in the neoliberal technocracy of commercialized for-profit OA publishing. They have, in fact, been collectively working on ways to confront, oppose, and work through this state of affairs,15 including, contra the accelerationists, by creating alternative, smaller-scale holding environments, sometimes called presses, where they have been “going interstitial,” in order to “imagine and experiment with emerging gaps and cracks in the gamespace that the commodity economy has become.”16 To the critique that such efforts just strengthen the system, some of us are not trying to reform or overhaul the system. Rather, we are looking to build sites of sanctuary and resistance that are scaled small-ish precisely to have a better chance at viability, which in turn better ensures the quality of life of our staff, our authors, and ourselves. And we never say permanent, long-term sustainability is what we want—far from it.17 A “legacy” is the last thing we want. We are not royalists. We did not ask to be burdened with taking on the big corporate–conglomerate publishers and overturning their hegemony, nor will we hurl our minds and bodies against this neoliberal system in hopes of breaking its ramparts, because we simply have other political work to do and because, for us, the local really is the political (we learned that from feminists).

punctum books was not founded to fight the big commercial publishers and, against what many may believe, we did not found the press to champion open access either. punctum books was founded to clear and secure open spaces of radical hospitality, against structures and systems of academic privilege, within which individual researchers, who may or may not be university faculty, might have more freedom to experiment, to take risks with form and content, and to pursue in their work their desires and not disciplinary-institutional imperatives. Our work is oppositional not only to Elsevier and Taylor & Francis in terms of scale and business practices, but also to the neoliberal Academy whose presses have published many important works, of course, but who have also participated in systems of institutional oversight and disciplinary homogeneity that stifle creativity and individual voices, which we believe is antithetical to what universities should be about: thinking out loud. That is what we fight for.18

These points are critically important to us because even within the scholar-led OA publishing community we have to deal with critiques along lines similar to Kember and Brand’s, such as expressed by Jefferson Pooley, who directs mediastudies.press, arguing that some scholar-led presses, including ours, have become too comfortable with their interstitiality: “Interstitialism for its own sake, untethered from any wider emancipatory aspiration, is a retreat, perhaps even an abdication.”19 He argues further that, “in radical open-access circles,” he can detect “diminished aspirations at the systemic level, paired with an acceptance of indefinite marginality.” And this is a problem, for Pooley, because “carving out alternative space, on this view, is a rational concession to an entrenched reality—rather than a promissory note toward a systemic overhaul.” Implicit within Pooley’s commentary is a desire to overturn “the system” and thus to become “central,” which can only, in our view, lead to the sorts of institutionality that would guarantee such centrality, to which we can only say, enjoy your symptoms (or your structuration). Whether the aim is the “middle ground” of university publishing (Kember and Brand), which amounts to paternalistic–avuncular (and thus deeply anti-feminist) gatekeeping, and which is also a clear rebuke of the idea that scholars themselves (or anyone else) could possibly create a valuably supplemental alternative, or whether it is a desire to move from the margins to the center (Pooley), which is at bottom a desire for dominance (even if utopian), we see visions for academic publishing that fundamentally do not change the deadening status quo of academic privilege.

Having said all of that, many OA advocates—at least at the level of smaller scholar-led OA presses, including punctum books, and some newer university presses—have actually been very antagonistic toward various forces of neoliberal capitalism and for-profit academic publishers, and with Kember and Brand, we agree that “knowledge is effectively being privatized” and that what we have “learned from the history of the internet … is how quickly corporatization, social stratification, and monopolization can take hold in an apparently free and open space.” We care about these things and we regularly spend time critiquing this state of affairs, as best we can. But we are skeptical of the idea that universities and their traditional “legacy” presses are the best, most trustworthy stewards of public knowledge, given all of the ways that university presses have long served the neoliberal techno-managerial oversight cultures of the university vis-à-vis the training of graduate students and the hiring, tenure, and promotion of faculty. Which also means that the academic freedom that Kember and Brand think isn’t being discussed enough by OA advocates is the last thing you will find at a traditional academic press, whether it is MIT Press or Routledge. University faculty rank and evaluate their colleagues’ work according to who it is published with versus its actual content and innovation thereof, and according to its impact factors, and according to its quantity versus its quality, while always, in the Humanities, valuing the “monograph” above and beyond every other form and style of writing, type of “book,” and co-authorship. University publishers are, with some exceptions, in step with institutional and disciplinary regimes of evaluation that are less about free thought and more about conformity and hyper-accelerated forms of scholarly production, even while claiming they “advance thought”—a motif of many university press mission statements. And as many university presses do not receive institutional subsidies that are adequate to their mission—because universities have abdicated their responsibility to support the very knowledge production and exchange that is supposedly their mission—they have been forced to let marketization concerns seep into acquisition and editorial processes.

University presses are no more able to escape the forces of neoliberal capital than anyone else, and it is well documented how corporate the public university has become.20 As we know from many scholars and analysts, we live in an age when everything can, and will be, monetized. This is an inescapable fact and has never been the result, or supposedly unfortunate outcome, of OA advocates clamoring for more public forms of knowledge. As Wendy Brown has put it, neoliberalism is

a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. … Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.21

Neoliberal capitalists, as mentioned above, were poaching the real estate of academic publishing—content, data, and infrastructure—long before the ascendancy of OA publishing, and there has been very little pushback, partly because universities have themselves been so complicit in this state of affairs: think of the corporate-owned infrastructure on which most university libraries run their operations, or the companies offshored in the Global South (such as Newgen Knowledge Works) that handle the copyediting, typesetting, and workflow management for many of the most well-known university presses, or all of the ways in which universities have been outsourcing practically all aspects of their day-to-day operations while also adjunctifying teaching positions and saddling students with crippling debt that can never be repaid due to the loss of federal and state funding. Public universities have become, in Brown’s parlance, economized “in a very specific way.” They are no longer “public” in any meaningful sense.

It is thus worth noting, we think, that in their overview of the development of the OA movement, Kember and Brand overlook how it has been academic institutions themselves—MIT not the least among them—that have actively litigated against public access to publicly funded knowledge, as was so clearly demonstrated by Aaron Swartz’s life and death.22 And it has been university presses that have supported and also “celebrated” copyright lawsuits against important public knowledge institutions, such as the Internet Archive, brought by corporate publishers such as Hatchette and John Wiley & Sons.23 The fact that university presses continue to assert in the colophons of their books that “all rights” are reserved to them, as opposed to exploring more creative and equitable ways to share copyrights with their authors, means they have invested in the notion that ideas are in fact property, which feels shortsighted in the extreme for a non-profit knowledge enterprise.24

All of this goes to show that there is an inherent, unresolvable tension between the “academy” and the publishing houses it purports to “own.” For what, then, does the “academy” in “academy-owned” even mean? It certainly doesn’t mean the scholars employed by the university, nor its students, who would then collectively own the means of knowledge production and dissemination. University press directors may be accountable to a variety of administrative figures within and outside the university, but they are certainly never accountable to a union of scholars and students that would determine the publisher’s editorial mission, acquisition protocols, business model, and distribution of revenues. Many university presses do not even represent the scholarly communities sheltered under their nominal umbrellas, developing publishing profiles and catalogs that are anything but bound to their local contexts, untethered by the neoliberal university administration who have decided, with very few exceptions, that university presses should mainly fend for themselves. Take away the logo and you would never guess that Duke University Press books were actually produced in North Carolina. For us, “academy” means scholars and teachers, wherever they may be, officially credentialed or not, university-based or not, and it certainly doesn’t mean the provost’s or chancellor’s office, which is where many presses receive their orders and their deficits.

And what about that second half of the coinage, “owned”? Who owns university presses? And how sustainable is that ownership relation? In point of fact, the universities own the presses and they are typically overseen and managed by provost’s or chancellor’s offices, which means every time there is a change in leadership, which is often, the funding and long-term security of the press is in question. The “crisis” of Stanford University Press in 2019 provides us with a clear example, when Stanford University’s Provost Persis Drell threatened to eliminate Stanford UP’s annual subsidy of $1.7 million under the assumption that it should operate more efficiently and have a better business plan.25 One of the richest universities in the world, on the whim of one person (and a right-wing conservative anti-humanist at that, who fought to bring Mike Pence to campus26) decided to withdraw funding from what she saw as a “second-rate,” financially insolvent press, risking a significant “downgrading” of the press’s role in intellectual culture, which has been significant. Hundreds signed a petition to “save” the press, as academic freedom was supposedly at stake and Stanford UP was too big to fail! It was a curious spectacle to witness, to see those who would never rally around a scholar-led OA press in peril, nor invest their intellectual capital in such—because of their stakes in the prestige knowledge economy—rally around Stanford UP’s potential demise as if the very soul of the humanities were at stake, when Stanford University itself might as well be Silicon Valley University. Is there any other university in the US, except for maybe MIT, where the subsumption of knowledge production and exchange under capital has long been a fait accompli? And this is why the “ownership” paradigm ultimately means that you can chuck something when it’s not making a profit, regardless of its “legacy” or place in historical “tradition.” And the decision makers who fund and manage the presses may even be hostile to the missions of those presses, as Drell was. As the US slips into oligarchism, there will be more Drells. Being “academy-owned” is thus a dubious distinction and we question why university presses would even want to claim this, except to shore up their status.

We do not want to take away from the genuine and admirable efforts of university presses to support and produce OA books, and as scholars, we have benefited from the books university presses have produced, just as we have also published our own work with many of them, so we are curious about the apparent lack of generosity with which Kember and Brand treat scholar-led presses. Whereas “scholar-led” as a term is agnostic about employment within academic institutions (some scholar-led presses are directed by university faculty while some operate on the margins of the university or are completely independent), “academy-owned” makes claims on the exclusivity of knowledge production within established academic institutions, and speaks about “ownership” rather than “leadership,” implying a strict adherence to the same precepts of property and patriarchy that underpin the “neoliberal” regime Kember and Brand ostensibly seek to criticize.

Perhaps “academy-owned” is primarily a circumscription that allows university presses to give to themselves the magical power to judge all others outside their limited economic niche as unsustainable or illegitimate, all the while shoring up their status against invaders on the beach. All of this obfuscates the fundamental fact of our field of labor: scholarly publishing has never been profitable and never will be. It will always require the investment of the public’s money as well as their trust, just like all scholarly endeavors. The best we can do is to collectively and responsibly funnel public funding—whether it comes through university libraries, governments, or funding agencies—into free and open scholarly communication channels and infrastructures, rather than into commercial publisher behemoths that privatize public investments and convert them into shareholder dividends and corporate bonuses. Because open access is ultimately about public education, in which we all have a stake, the responsibility for which the neoliberal university has abdicated. For us, the academy, if it exists, is more properly understood to be “at large”—in the world and away from the harsh fluorescent lighting of the University proper. It requires what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “fugitive planning”27 and it lives and breathes wherever people gather to read, think, and write and wherever there are books and libraries. And a scholarly publisher is a person, or a group of persons, who takes responsibility for making and disseminating the books, wherever they may come from, to whomever they may be addressed, and in whatever forms they may take.