Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS 

Introduction

This article examines how democratization narratives within open access (OA) publishing have shaped the ways openness is conceptualized and enacted in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). It does so by tracing these discourses across institutional and policy contexts, geographies, disciplines, and scholarly traditions, combining close readings of advocacy texts, policy frameworks, and scholarly contributions with an analysis of three contemporary experimental OA initiatives.

Focusing on early advocacy texts (such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative [2002]), the work of prominent OA proponents such as Jean-Claude Guédon and John Willinsky, and the implementation of OA through policy frameworks such as Plan S and national funder mandates, the article shows how democratization is frequently equated with the broad dissemination of research outputs. These narratives are grounded in liberal-humanist ideals such as the value of individual reason, informed judgment, and civic responsibility—presuming that once financial, legal, and technical barriers are removed, equitable participation will follow. In doing so, they overlook the social, epistemic, and affective conditions under which scholarship is produced, evaluated, and experienced—and how these conditions can reproduce hierarchies of privilege and exclusion within scholarly communication.

As OA publishing increasingly becomes embedded in policy and funder mandates as well as in prestige-driven evaluation systems dominated by commercial actors, HSS scholars increasingly experience it as a bureaucratic obligation rather than an intellectual or ethical commitment. Even those critical of these dynamics often lack the time, resources, or institutional support to explore alternative models. In this context, the space for reimagining what openness could mean—or what democratization might require—is systematically constrained.

To challenge and intervene into these dominant imaginaries, the article advances the hypothesis that alternative conceptualizations of OA publishing—emerging from intersectional feminist, decolonial, and post-hegemonic traditions—offer critical resources for rethinking both openness and democratization in HSS. These approaches, often developed at the margins of dominant OA discourse and frequently overlooked as central to the OA landscape, understand openness not as a stable ideal or technical solution, but as a situated practice—shaped by and attending to the social, epistemic, and affective conditions under which scholarship is created, shared, and valued.

To ground, specify, and expand these alternative imaginaries, the article turns to three publishing initiatives: Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium (Méndez Cota 2023), a collectively authored response to Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s (2016) The Chernobyl Herbarium; the “Open Science Manifesto” (OCSDNet 2017), a collectively authored declaration articulating context-specific and justice-oriented approaches to open science by members of the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet); and “editing otherwise,” a horizontal editorial practice I developed during my guest editorship of the Culture Machine journal’s special issue “Publishing After Progress” (Kiesewetter 2024c). These projects explore how openness can be practiced within existing constraints through modest shifts in publishing workflows, collaborative modes of authorship, and editorial practices attuned to lived experience, relational accountability, and epistemic pluralism. This article’s original contribution lies in making that commitment legible—by grounding alternative conceptualizations of openness in specific, materially and epistemically situated publishing practices. In doing so, this article reaffirms the role of HSS as active contributors to the shaping of open futures for scholarly communication.

Open Access and Democracy: Between Ideals and Large-Scale Institutionalization

To unpack the entanglements between OA publishing, democracy, and specific visions of openness, this section examines how narratives of democratization have shaped the conceptualization and implementation of mainstream OA publishing—that is, large-scale, policy-driven initiatives and infrastructures aimed at embedding OA within national and international research systems. It begins by discussing early advocacy documents and foundational texts to explore how openness was framed as a normative ideal grounded in liberal-humanist visions of rational inquiry, historical continuity, and the public good. It then examines how these ideals have been institutionalized through funder mandates, policy frameworks, and commercial infrastructures that tie openness to output-oriented forms of prestige and competitive research assessment. Finally, it explores how these conditions are experienced and negotiated by HSS scholars through their publishing practices, professional identities, and emotional investments in their work.

Doing Openness Otherwise

To re-engage the democratic potentials of OA publishing, this section draws on intersections among post-hegemonic, epistemic justice–oriented, decolonial, and intersectional feminist approaches to OA publishing. These approaches have emerged within HSS at various historical moments, across disciplines, and in diverse geopolitical contexts. As I have written elsewhere, often situated at the margins of dominant OA discourse, such initiatives have frequently gone unrecognized as integral to the OA ecosystem (Kiesewetter 2023). Additionally, assessed against the background of dominant expectations of scalability, this “radical wing of the movement” is often dismissed as “niche” (Poynder 2019, 73), “artisanal” and “cottage-sized” (Fisher 2015), or inherently unscalable, failing to meet dominant expectations of market viability and efficiency (Clarke 2015). Yet such framings, as Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore (2021) argue, obscure the differentiated, situated practices these projects sustain—modes of collaboration and governance that promote care, diversity, and resilience through mutual reliance rather than economies of scale. Rather than subsume these initiatives under a single genealogy or categorize them through narrow frames—such as “niche,” “artisanal,” or “small scale”—this article seeks to pluralize the possible pasts, presents, and futures of OA publishing.

Across the histories of OA publishing, various advocates have challenged the liberal-democratic and access-oriented narratives outlined earlier. Drawing on anti-hegemonic movements and relational worldviews—such as buen vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in Africa, and the work of theorists such as Arjun Appadurai and Boaventura de Sousa Santos²—they argue that mainstream affirmations of knowledge democracy often remain rhetorical, detached from the situated, collective struggles through which social, epistemic, and ontological transformation unfolds (see, for example, Hillyer et al. 2020; Piron et al. 2016; Raju et al. 2020). From this perspective, democratization through OA publishing cannot be reduced to technocratic fixes that equate openness with access or treat the removal of economic, legal, and technical barriers as proxies for democratic change. Instead, it must be reimagined as a plural, contested process grounded in epistemic justice—that is, addressing whose knowledge counts, who gets to speak, and which epistemologies are legitimized. This also requires attending to situated agency and embracing heterogeneity rather than assuming universality or neutrality. Other OA advocates draw on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism and Étienne Balibar’s notion of a “democratization of democracy” to conceptualize OA as a form of continuous democratization, in which disagreement, experimentation, and critical self-reflection are integral to sustaining openness as a living practice—complicating the conflation of democratization with universal access (see, e.g., Adema and Hall 2013; Hall 2008). Some link OA publishing to activist traditions rooted in anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and labor movements. These include the Combahee River Collective, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Precarias a la Deriva, and Cita Press, publishing initiatives that approach collaborative publishing as a form of resistance to dominant white, male, Western, and capitalist epistemologies (Adema 2024; Albornoz et al. 2020; Kiesewetter 2020, 2023). In these framings, OA publishing becomes a terrain for multilateral struggle and relational world-making, where academic and activist practices are entwined forms of shared praxis. This resonates with what Judith Fathallah (2026) writes about OA publishing as a site of agential intervention, where scholars enact and transform discourse through material and relational practices.

Building on these theoretical interventions, OA publishing has been understood as a doing—“less a project and model to be implemented, and more a process of continuous struggle and critical resistance” (Adema and Hall 2013, 33); “an entry point to intervene into the hegemonic system of traditional scientific knowledge” (Albornoz et al. 2020, 131); “a way to dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do” (Amiran et al. 1990); or an “undoing scholarship,” a sustained effort to deconstruct structures of oppression based on class, gender, and race within everyday academic processes and practices (Kiesewetter 2020, 115). Others have emphasized OA as a means of rejecting the “spirit of competition and individualism” while prioritizing “friendship and cooperation” in editorial processes (Le grenier des savoirs, n.d.). Further conceptualizations present OA as an opportunity to rethink research cultures themselves—not to import Global North methods wholesale, but to enable the emergence of bottom-up critical discourses in response to the top-down corporatization of university cultures (Magazine and Méndez Cota 2024, 12–13).

These perspectives render untenable the conceptual entanglement of openness with a liberal-democratic ideal of inclusion through fostering access to research output, as reflected in the conceptualizations of OA publishing I discuss earlier in this article. Such framings equate the removal of formal barriers with democratic participation while obscuring the structural, procedural, and affective conditions that shape whose knowledge is recognized, shared, and valued. The approaches foregrounded here, instead, draw attention to the problematic constraints of academic knowledge production under metricized evaluation regimes—constraints that compel scholars to prioritize output, legibility, and efficiency and marginalize more speculative, situated, or emotionally engaged modes of inquiry. Refusing these terms, they reimagine scholarly work as a site of democratization—through practices that attend to the actual conditions under which knowledge is produced.

This reorientation of OA publishing also reshapes the very notion of openness on which these practices are based. As Janneke Adema argues, doing OA involves cultivating “forms of openness that do not simply repeat … established forms … or succumb to the closures” (2018, 22–23) produced by the institutionalization of OA—such as its codification into policy mandates and compliance checklists, as discussed earlier. In this way, as Adema and Gary Hall (2013) note, OA opens space “for reimagining what counts as scholarship and research … what an author, a text, and a work actually is.” Similarly, Denisse Albornoz et al. (2020) call for a vision of openness grounded in political engagement, community participation, and the collective imagination of “futures radically different from the present.” In this spirit, Janneke Adema, Samuel A. Moore, Tobias Steiner, and I—as co-convenors of the Radical Open Access Collective, a network of around seventy not-for-profit presses, journals, and OA projects—have proposed a shift from “openness” to “social justice activism.” This shift moves beyond technocratic definitions to engage directly with the politics of creating diverse, equitable, and supportive publishing conditions, within and beyond the academy (ROAC 2025).

The approaches discussed above treat democracy not as a fixed ideal, but as a situated and ongoing process—shaped by the conditions under which knowledge is created, shared, and valued. Rather than define openness as access to research outputs, they reframe it as a relational practice tied to struggles over epistemic justice, institutional conditions, and scholarly experience. In this way, they shift the focus from openness as a policy goal to openness as a lived, collective practice—emerging from and responsive to the affective, procedural, and institutional realities of academic labor.

Yet, as I elaborated earlier, for many scholars—especially within HSS—the pressures of performance, precarity, and institutional exhaustion render such reimaginings difficult to pursue, no matter how resonant they may be in principle. Hence, the three publishing initiatives discussed in the following section do not offer systemic solutions—but they do create openings. They ground, concretize, and expand this reimagining of openness as situated praxis by illustrating how collective experimentation, relational engagement, and modest shifts in publishing practices can help scholars hold space to act, relate, and imagine otherwise, within and beyond the constraints of existing systems.

The three initiatives I examine are Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium (Méndez Cota 2023), a project that reuses open-licensed books through collaborative rewriting; the “Open Science Manifesto” (OCSDNet 2017), a collectively authored declaration that articulates context-sensitive approaches to open science; and “editing otherwise” (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b), an experimental editorial praxis that foregrounds scholarly agency, relational accountability, and the emotional dimensions of academic labor in resistance to metric-driven publishing cultures.

Practicing OA Publishing as Democratic Struggle

Building on the arguments developed in the previous section, what does it mean to collaboratively reconfigure the conditions under which scholarly work is created, reviewed, and experienced? And how can such situated efforts complicate dominant conceptualizations of openness in practice?

Ecological Rewriting was developed by Open Humanities Press (OHP) and the Experimental Publishing Group of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, as part of Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers, a pilot initiative aimed at stimulating the reuse of OA scholarly books. The pilot led to the launch of a new series within OHP’s Living/Liquid Books. This series is edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall, and myself. Ecological Rewriting—the first title in this series—was published bilingually in Spanish and English on the open source platform PubPub.³ Contributors from across Mexico, led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, responded collectively to The Chernobyl Herbarium (Marder and Tondeur 2016), engaging its ecological, affective, and political resonances from a situated, decolonial perspective (Méndez Cota 2023). The “Open Science Manifesto” (OCSDNet 2017) was collaboratively written by OCSDNet’s twelve researcher-practitioner teams based in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, both within and outside academia. Supported by the networks’ coordination team—Leslie Chan and four regionally based research associates—the project used collaborative writing, editing, and publishing as methods for building consensus across diverse communities (Albornoz et al. 2017). “Editing otherwise” was an experimental editorial approach I developed as guest editor of the “Publishing After Progress” issue of Culture Machine, an OA journal of culture and theory founded in 1999 by cultural studies scholars Gary Hall and Dave Boothroyd as an “experimental opening toward heterogeneity, an opening which can never be conclusive or contained” (Culture Machine 2000). Culture Machine—including its notion of openness as a continual, uncontainable movement toward plurality—is grounded in critical cultural studies approaches to OA publishing, some of which are explored in the previous section. With “editing otherwise,” I aimed to bring concerns about knowledge equity and diversity into conversation with the psychosocial and emotional dimensions of academic life under productivity- and metric-driven publishing regimes (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b).

The special issue “Publishing After Progress” brought together a diverse group of contributors—academics, activists, and artists from Argentina, Belgium, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—working across distinct disciplinary, cultural, and political contexts (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b). The open call for submissions, launched in winter 2023, was a deliberate performative act: a first step toward creating situated conditions in which a heterogeneous group could temporarily engage within a shared political domain. This domain was shaped through publishing practices that critically responded to the growing conflict between institutional expectations and contributors’ own visions of meaningful engagement amid planetary emergencies, democratic deterioration, and systemic inequities in academic and non-academic publishing. Widely distributed through mailing lists, social media, and personal networks, the call explicitly welcomed submissions in English, Spanish, German, and Italian and sought to include knowledge producers beyond the privileged spaces where the future of academic publishing is typically discussed—such as dominant OA and open science discourses. Working within a similarly heterogeneous constellation, the collaborative writing process behind the “Open Science Manifesto” allowed OCSDNet’s members to recognize and navigate their different situated experiences, priorities, and commitments. As Albornoz et al. note, this process “allowed us to redistribute the narrative power in terms of defining the story we would tell as a collective, from the central OCSDNet coordination team to the network members who are implementing the projects on the ground” (2017, 299). Taken together, these examples challenge a core assumption embedded in the historical and contemporary OA frameworks discussed earlier—namely, that open access publishing inherently yields more democratic forms of knowledge production. Instead, they show that democratic scholarly exchange across difference must be actively cultivated rather than emerge from access to research outputs alone. These encounters are made possible through publishing practices that attend to the situated, relational, and often uneven conditions under which knowledge is produced and shared—treating difference not as a barrier to be overcome, but as a generative foundation for reimagining scholarly communication.

To define the scope of their rewriting, the authors of Ecological Rewriting used the collaborative open source web annotation tool Hypotheses to annotate the PDF of The Chernobyl Herbarium available on OHP’s website. They then used the open source markdown editor HedgeDoc to collect their notes using tags to structure their insights and begin developing their response.⁴ Each author elaborated a personal mode of engaging with Marder and Tondeur’s book, reflecting on questions such as: What of the Chernobyl event resonates today in a place like Mexico? Taking up The Chernobyl Herbarium’s meditative, fragmentary form allowed contributors to experiment with more creative and testimonial registers in their own academic writing. As Méndez Cota and her co-authors note, while “modern conventions and styles of writing often require an erasure of subjectivity, singularity, and multiplicity in favor of a clear line of argument expressed through a detached or ‘objective’ voice,” their process “rather than being pre-planned as a critical program, materialized gradually through the collaborative process of becoming experimental writers or ‘rewriters’” (Magazine and Méndez Cota 2024; Méndez Cota 2023).

Similarly emphasizing relational and evolving authorship, the initial phase of writing the “Manifesto” saw OCSDNet coordination team members invite each of the twelve research teams to analyze their local knowledge ecosystems (Albornoz et al. 2017). The resulting reflections were developed through remote consultations, group calls, workshops, and collaborative editing sessions. The coordination team then synthesized the inputs, followed by plenary feedback rounds in which the seven core principles of open science were refined from each team’s situated perspective. This iterative process shaped the manifesto’s content, tone, and multilingual translations (French, Spanish, Afrikaans) and led to its dissemination in various formats including infographics, videos, pamphlets, and posters. As these examples show, shifting OA publishing away from frameworks that assimilate difference under universalist and meritocratic logics—logics that, as discussed earlier, presume equal participation once formal barriers to access are removed—requires re-engaging with the epistemic, institutional, and affective conditions under which scholarly work is produced, evaluated, and shared. In this context, openness is tethered to output, scale, and visibility, reinforcing an ideal of scholarly communication as a neutral space governed by fairness and reason. The collaborative publishing practices examined here instead insist that equitable scholarly engagement across difference does not emerge automatically from access to research output alone. It must be actively cultivated through practices that treat heterogeneity not as a challenge to be managed, but as a generative condition for democratic scholarly exchange.

One such practice is peer review, which in HSS repeatedly has been critiqued for reinforcing normative standards under the guise of neutrality and, particularly in its double-blind form, fostering harmful behaviors (Bozalek et al. 2019; Fitzpatrick 2011; Ross-Hellauer 2017). In response, both Ecological Rewriting and “editing otherwise” adopted open peer review, foregrounding it as a collaborative, situated process. For Ecological Rewriting, each piece was reviewed by a named external reviewer, with feedback exchanged via Hypotheses. To address power asymmetries—many reviewers held senior roles—members of COPIM’s Experimental Publishing Group created a code of conduct, developed technical and contextual guidelines, and acted as moderators to ensure horizontal, respectful dialogue. For “Publishing After Progress,” I paired academic contributors with two academic reviewers and non-academic contributors with one academic and one non-academic reviewer. With this, I wanted to reflect both the journal’s scholarly foundation and its commitment to heterogeneity. Pairings were designed to foster dialogue between contributors whose intellectual terrains resonated but weren’t fully aligned, encouraging meaningful exchange. Reviewer guidelines were shared early, and contributors could opt out in favor of traditional double-blind review. I emphasized peer review as an ethical wager rather than as procedural formality, requiring consent-based, good-faith engagement in rethinking the norms of academic evaluation and value. Reviewers were invited to reconceptualize scholarly value: not as externally imposed by universalist standards or metrics, but as emerging from the specific contexts in which work gains meaning. Authors and reviewers were encouraged to co-design their exchange, choosing feedback formats, languages, and communication tools that suited their needs. This led to rich, multi-channel exchanges (emails, shared online documents, annotated PDFs, and video calls), some of which are documented in Culture Machine’s “Interzone” section. Here, peer review was not a final judgment but a dialogic space of encounter, mutual transformation, and ethical co-becoming—where the value and relevance of a scholarly work emerged relationally through the entanglements of texts, people, and contexts (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b).

The participatory making of the “Open Science Manifesto” required ongoing adjustments to accommodate contributors’ diverse positionalities, languages, and expectations. Engagement varied: for example, some participants were less motivated or lacked the resources to contribute, and the manifesto’s relevance differed depending on local priorities and institutional contexts. In response, the coordination team shifted from writing to facilitating, supporting quieter voices through interviews, emails, and group or one-on-one calls (Albornoz et al. 2017). A similar dynamic shaped Ecological Rewriting, which required extensive (non-linguistic) translation and negotiation across conceptual, technical, and organizational dimensions. For members of the COPIM Experimental Publishing Group who facilitated the project, this meant accommodating the relational and open-ended nature of the co-authors’ contributions; responding to varying levels of technical familiarity; and developing modular, recursive workflows and flexible timelines that aligned with the institutional and personal rhythms of everyone involved. Rather than impose a fixed schedule, the editorial process remained fluid and dialogically shaped. Key stages such as copyediting and peer review occurred when they made the most sense for the authors and the evolving work itself (Adema and Kiesewetter 2022; Bowie et al. 2022).

In “Publishing After Progress,” too, editorial timelines were revised multiple times to reflect the social, emotional, and temporal realities of contributors. This flexibility was more than pragmatic—it was a deliberate effort to center the relational and affective conditions of academic labor and to resist the alienation and stress endemic to increasingly competitive environments (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b). The project pushed back against norms that treat exhaustion, frustration, or even joy as irrelevant to scholarly value. Instead, “editing otherwise” viewed these emotional dimensions as both inevitable and essential to how scholarship is imagined, made, and shared. Similarly, as Roger Magazine and Gabriela Méndez Cota (2024) emphasize, Ecological Rewriting approached OA publishing not as a technical intervention but as a commitment to nurturing—rather than evaluating or devaluing—the social relations and processes that sustain scholarly life.

Across the projects discussed here, the existential dimensions of academic work—relationality, emotion, and the intricacy of experience—were not treated as distractions from scholarship but as central to its practice. In doing so, they enacted an alternative vision of OA publishing: one that challenges dominant performance logics by enabling knowledge-making as a situated, collective, and affective endeavor.

Across all three projects, the labor of facilitation—including mediation, adaptation, and emotional support—placed considerable strain on those coordinating the process as they navigated diverse positionalities, timelines, and institutional pressures (Adema and Kiesewetter 2022; Albornoz et al. 2017; Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b). These strains are unlikely to disappear, as such work remains structurally undervalued within academic reward systems that privilege quantifiable outputs over process-oriented, emotionally invested, and relational labor (Ahmed 2012; Churcher and Talbot 2020; Gill 2016). Acknowledging and addressing this labor was a core concern in Ecological Rewriting, “editing otherwise,” and the “Open Science Manifesto”: for example, through open project documentation, blogposts, scholarly OA articles, and public workshops. These acts of sharing were not merely reflective or aimed at streamlining publishing workflows. They also sought to enable others to imagine, adapt, and initiate similar practices in their own contexts—within and beyond OA publishing.

In this sense, making the labor of facilitation explicit was also an effort to foster what I have elsewhere called an “agency-sustaining mutual encouragement” among engaged knowledge producers (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b). These acts of sharing were not merely reflective exercises or attempts to streamline publishing workflows. They also aimed to enable others to imagine, adapt, and initiate similar practices within their own contexts—both inside and outside of OA publishing. In this sense, foregrounding the labor of facilitation became a way to foster what I have elsewhere called an “agency-sustaining mutual encouragement” among engaged knowledge producers (Kiesewetter 2024a, 2024b). This includes supporting others in cultivating the social, epistemic, and affective conditions under which academic (OA) publishing can function as a space to affirm the role of HSS—and of the university more broadly—as an experimental site of critical intellectual engagement and democratizing practice, beyond metrics of productivity and visibility.

As this section has shown, Ecological Rewriting, the “Open Science Manifesto,” and “editing otherwise” foreground the procedural and emotional dimensions through which scholarly work is performed, valued, and experienced. For example, they do so by insisting on equity, diversity, and pluralism as existentially necessary for reshaping the conditions under which democratization in scholarly publishing can meaningfully occur; by experimenting with context-sensitive peer review processes that enable reciprocal, situated engagement with value rather than external, normative judgment; by adapting editorial workflows and timelines to participants’ realities and needs, supporting modes of working that resist linear or standardized procedures; and by inviting contributions in multiple languages, genres, and epistemic registers, thereby challenging dominant assumptions about what counts as legible or valuable academic work. These projects resist prevailing logics of academic productivity and performance. Instead, they affirm OA publishing as a space where scholarly work becomes a terrain of democratization—through situated, relational, and ongoing experimentation with the procedural, epistemic, and psychosocial conditions of academic labor. Across these initiatives, as I suggest here, openness (rather than being considered a neutral procedure or policy target) functions as an ongoing, active, and practical insistence that other ways of doing academic work—of being and becoming a scholar—are possible and perhaps already emerging. As generations of intersectional feminist scholars have reminded us, such emergence is not a utopian escape or a guaranteed future, but a commitment to continue within—and despite—the cracks of the current system (Anzaldúa 1987; hooks 1994; Solnit 2016).

Conclusion

This article has examined how democratization narratives within OA publishing have shaped the ways openness is conceptualized and enacted in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). As shown, dominant frameworks—especially those rooted in early advocacy documents such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and taken up by influential figures such as Jean-Claude Guédon and John Willinsky—often have framed OA publishing as a continuation of a long-standing scholarly ethos of free sharing, portraying it as a democratic “public good” made possible by the convergence of “an old tradition” and “a new technology” (BOAI 2002; Guédon 2017; Willinsky 2006). Extending this continuity claim, contemporary policy initiatives such as Plan S, the Swiss National Strategy for OA, and the European Commission’s Open Science policy promote OA publishing as a vehicle for societal benefit and scientific advancement. In these accounts, openness is conceptualized as unimpeded access to scholarly outputs, grounded in a liberal-humanist ethos of reason and civic responsibility—and a meritocratic belief in procedural fairness. It presumes that once financial and technical barriers are removed, equitable participation naturally follows, thereby abstracting openness from the structural, procedural, and affective conditions that shape how scholarly knowledge is actually created and valued.

As this article has shown, such output-centric definitions of openness have become deeply entangled with market-driven publishing models and performance-based academic governance. National research evaluation frameworks such as the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Italy’s Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca (VQR) embed OA publishing requirements into systems that use citation-based metrics as proxies for scholarly prestige that are shaped by commercial players, whose proprietary platforms, impact metrics, and data analytics tools have become central to how scholarly value is quantified and rewarded. Openness here is reduced to a compliance measure—a checkbox in performance bureaucracy. Under these conditions, HSS scholars often experience OA publishing as a bureaucratic requirement embedded in metrics-driven academic cultures.

Within these evaluation cultures, pressures to meet output targets often lead to the marginalization of speculative, relational, or emotionally engaged forms of inquiry. For example, scholars may abandon dialogic, creative, or transdisciplinary projects that do not align with measurable outcomes, which raises democratic concerns about whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate, whose voices are heard, and which forms of scholarly engagement are valued or excluded. At the same time, the emotional strain produced by performance demands—especially for scholars in precarious or marginalized positions (Gill 2016; Khúc 2024; Kiesewetter 2023)—is frequently pathologized or dismissed. These pressures shape what is published by whom and how scholarship is experienced. Even though HSS scholars have traditionally been critical of output-driven metrics and their distorting effects on scholarly publishing, the institutional pressure to produce, perform, and remain competitive often leaves little time or support to explore alternative modes of conducting and publishing their research.

As OA becomes further entangled with commercial agendas, bureaucratic mandates, and prestige economies, many scholars have grown disillusioned with it as a site of meaningful engagement. This article, however, has insisted on OA’s democratic potential, foregrounding alternative approaches rooted in intersectional feminist, decolonial, and post-hegemonic traditions. In their visions of OA publishing, they have understood democratization as an ongoing process shaped by the situated conditions of knowledge creation and sharing. Rather than defining openness as access to research outputs, they have reframed it as a relational practice tied to struggles over epistemic justice, institutional conditions, and scholarly experience. Openness thus shifts from a universalizing promise of access to a praxis of collective engagement—attuned to difference and committed to transforming the uneven conditions of knowledge-making.

Building on these insights, the article turned to three publishing initiatives—Ecological Rewriting, the “Open Science Manifesto,” and “editing otherwise”—to specify and expand earlier conceptualizations of openness and democracy through attention to the conditions under which scholarly work is created and taken up. Across these projects, democratization is not an abstract goal, but enacted through situated scholarly practices: peer review as dialogic exchange; editorial workflows attuned to contributors’ lived realities; and invitations to publish across multiple genres, languages, and epistemic traditions. These practices reflect an ongoing effort to make scholarly communication more just and equitable. Here, openness operates as a collective insistence: a tenacious, often fragile commitment to holding space for doing scholarship differently, even amid institutional pressure and affective exhaustion. In this sense, openness affirms that other ways of doing academic work—of being and becoming a scholar—are both imaginable and already taking shape.

In this sense, and following Sarah Kember’s (2014) call to “open out from OA,” openness might be reimagined not as a policy-mandated destination but as a practice of holding space for other ways of doing scholarship (and becoming a scholar) to emerge, however tentatively, incompletely, or precariously. This is not a promise of transformation but a commitment to its possibility. And it is this commitment—enacted through concrete practices of writing, editing, reviewing, and collaborating otherwise—that reaffirms the role of HSS as active contributors to the open futures for scholarly communication.

Open Peer Review Reports

Open peer review reports for this article are available at the following location: https://doi.org/10.17613/ywr3x-qmn83