Radical Publishing

This past weekend, I enjoyed Minor Compositions’ recent book Publishing as Collective Infrastructure (2026). The book offers the most radical perspective on open access publishing that I’ve encountered. Instead of seeing OA publishing a means to some or another academic or professional end, the authors argue that OA publishing can be a kind of performative engagement with knowledge making. To make this potential clear, Minor Compositions produce a book generated by radical forms of collective authorship supported by open and collaborative tools and technologies. The first chapter of the book outlined the standard arguments for OA publishing and pushed back against the growing tide of open access compliance publishing that adopts the form of open publishing, but lacks it spirit. In recent years, OA has been driven forward by aggressive for-profit publishers who see a future in aggregating content often with the help of LLM driven generative AI. Institutions see OA as a popular tool to…