Into the Fugitive Open – Matthew Cheney

"The logic of academic publishing allows immense exploitation. It’s a logic that began from a somewhat different place, one where most academics who were involved with publishing were able to make a good living as professors, their publishing work was considered an esteemed part of their professorship, and publishing was subsidized by universities and scholarly organizations — it was not commercial or profit-driven (and, in fact, rarely profitable). The work of academia, for all its various faults, oppressions, and exclusions, was closer to Moore’s idea of a commons, at least on the production side.

That world no longer exists, and not only because corporate and for-profit publishers entered the scene. It no longer exists because most professors are now barely able to survive on their work as professors and universities have been neoliberalized. The whole ecosystem is corrupted and rotting. But people keep approaching publishing as if the world hasn’t changed utterly, and thus allow themselves to be exploited and to be complicit with exploitation, extraction, and enclosure — the very opposite of the commons."