ServPub’ – Infrastructures of Publishing aims to:
The working premise is that despite the trend towards open access, it remains odd/anachronistic that relatively little has changed in academic publishing and scholars still seek to distribute their work through established forms (and paywalls) even when more accessible and sustainable ones are available. With few exceptions (such as arXiv and PubPeer), publishing workflows tend to follow a model that remains relatively unchanged since industrialism and the first catalogues of research publications. Guiding questions for the project are (but not limited to): What are the relations between institutional practices of research and research publication? What is a ‘publication’ if not considered a uniform object, but a networked object that also creates its ‘publics’ in the process? How can publishing processes be adapted to open practices and vice versa? What infrastructural, organizational, technical, and cultural practices occur in this process? What visions and ideals of care, maintenance, participation, engagement, and more, do they reflect?
The project containst two parts.
Publishing infrastructure: Firstly, in collaboration with Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University), Creative Computing Institute (University of the Arts London), and grassroot tech collectives Varia, and using wiki-to-print tools, git repositories and other types of F/LOSS, the project experiments with ways of drawing together previously separated processes in academic research and publishing: Research development (reading, writing and conversation) production (editing, peer-review, design, and layout), and dissemination (print and distribution). The proposal is to develop a viable alternative and bespoke F/LOSS-based publishing infrastructure which can support new and existing publishing initiatives – to open-up the future potential of academic publishing as a cultural practice in which books can be written and read as networked objects.
ServPub: Secondly, in further collaboration with grassroot collectives Systerserver and In-Grid, the project specifically addresses the question of hosting and maintaining the publication infrastructure (see also the project "CTP-server"). This includes the deconstruction of the relation between host and guest, and questioning the affective role of infrastructures: how technical practices are practiced as ‘minor’ technologies (and opposed to ‘big tech’), how they can be attentive to practices of care for the social and the environment (i.e., 'feminist' practices), and more. ServPub is intended to be run by collectives of artists, coders, activists, scholars, researchers using F/LOSS values and practices.
Related resources on publishing:
Useful resources on ‘minor’ hosting and serving:
Publications:
Participants:
'ServPub' was initiated in 2023, but the experimental academic publishing ('infrastructures of publishing') began already in 2011, with the launch of the first A Peer-reviewed Newspaper.
