What is it about?
examines how open access is reshaping scholarly communication, while remaining entangled in global capitalist structures. It argues that the shift to digital and open access has not simply democratized knowledge, because core questions—who owns platforms, who pays to publish, and who controls circulation—still concentrate power in large commercial publishers and Northern institutions. Using a Marxist lens, Bourdieuan viewpoint, and concepts such as cognitive capitalism, copyleft, and bibliodiversity, the authors show how academic knowledge, though socially produced, is enclosed as proprietary content and monetized through paywalls or author‑facing article processing charges. They contrast corporate open access models with more radical, commons‑oriented approaches that seek to treat knowledge as a shared public good, emphasize diverse local publishing ecologies, and foreground collective governance of infrastructures. The chapter concludes that meaningful transformation of publishing requires not just free access to texts but structural changes in ownership and control of the means of producing and disseminating scholarship.
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Why is it important?
This article is important because it reframes open access not as a purely technical or ethical improvement, but as a struggle over economic structures and power in scholarly communication. It foregrounds how ownership of platforms, licenses, and infrastructures determines who can genuinely participate in knowledge production, making visible dynamics that are often treated as neutral “publishing logistics.” By bringing Marxist concepts such as cognitive capitalism into conversation with open access debates, the chapter offers a theoretically robust bridge between critical political economy and library/publishing practice, which is still relatively rare. Its focus on copyleft and bibliodiversity is timely in a landscape where APC‑driven open access risks reproducing Northern, corporate dominance under the banner of “openness”; the article intervenes by insisting on decolonial, commons‑oriented models rather than marketized reforms. Uniquely, it treats open access declarations (like Berlin) not as endpoints but as starting points for rethinking governance, property, and collective control of scholarly infrastructures, making the piece valuable both for critical theory and for policy discussions in universities and funding agencies.
Perspectives
This article matters to me because it names and theorizes what many of us experience only as a vague sense of unease about “how publishing works.” By foregrounding access, ownership, and control as the central categories, we are arguing that publishing is not a neutral pipeline but a political infrastructure that shapes who gets to produce and circulate knowledge in the first place. In a moment when open access is often celebrated uncritically, I see this piece as a necessary intervention: it shows how paywalls may be lowered for readers while new barriers are raised for authors through APCs and platform monopolies. As an author, I consider this a significant contribution because it connects critical theory, especially Marxist analyses of cognitive capitalism and enclosure, to very concrete questions faced by researchers, librarians, and editors. It offers a vocabulary (commons, copyleft, bibliodiversity) and a set of principles for imagining alternatives, rather than stopping at critique. In doing so, the article pushes the conversation beyond compliance with open‑access mandates toward a deeper rethinking of how we might collectively own, govern, and democratize the infrastructures of scholarly communication.
Prabuddha Ghosh
Jadavpur University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Politics of Publishing: Access, Ownership, and Control, January 2025, Atlantis Press,
DOI: 10.2991/978-2-38476-533-1_64.
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