Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

Why Open Access Is Bigger Than Publishing

Open access often gets reduced to a debate about journal paywalls, but the essays in Reassembling Scholarly Communications show that the stakes reach much further. Edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, this MIT Press collection brings together scholars, librarians, archivists, and infrastructure builders to examine how open access intersects with colonial history, social justice, public institutions, digital platforms, and the global distribution of knowledge.

Published in 2020 and released under a Creative Commons CC BY license, the book is both a study of open scholarly communication and an example of it. Its twenty-five chapters and introduction move across continents and disciplines, asking who gets to produce knowledge, who gets to read it, and what kinds of systems make those answers possible.

What the Book Explores

The volume is organized into six sections: Colonial Influences, Epistemologies, Publics and Politics, Archives and Preservation, Infrastructures and Platforms, and Global Communities. Each section opens a different angle on open access. You’ll find discussions of epistemic alienation in African scholarly communications, the politics of UK public libraries, the role of the Royal Society, the platformization of open knowledge, and the development of SciELO and linked open data in Latin America.

Rather than treating access as a simple technical switch, the contributors examine it as a social, legal, and political arrangement. Chapters consider peer review, copyright’s origins, digital preservation, the ethics of care, and the sustainability of research communities. The result is a book that helps readers see open access as a set of ongoing negotiations over power, memory, and public value.

Who Will Find It Useful

This collection speaks to anyone who works with or studies scholarly communication: librarians, publishers, researchers, students in information science and digital humanities, and policymakers thinking about knowledge infrastructure. The essays are written for an informed but not exclusively specialist audience, making the book suitable for graduate seminars, professional development, and anyone trying to understand why open access has become such a central—and contested—idea in modern research.

An Open Access Book About Open Access

There is a certain logic to a book on open scholarly communication being openly available. Reassembling Scholarly Communications not only analyzes the movement but also embodies its arguments about access, reuse, and global participation. For readers interested in the past, present, and possible futures of how research circulates, this is a substantial and thought-provoking starting point.