Community Publishing

At its heart, this guide is for people who would like to practice community, largely DIY, academic publishing. Some attributes of community academic publishing include:

• co-authorship
• greater control over the form and design of the publication
• communicating outside of academia to share work
• storing work in free and open online repositories; contributing to decentralized infrastructure for knowledge production
• unlearning traditional academic writing styles
• sharing knowledge outside of traditional publishing practices
• caring for contributors, the community, and the labor of writing and publishing
• meaningfully engaging with colleagues’ expertise
• seeking collaboration, leaning on our colleagues to produce the best research we can in the circumstances and contexts we find ourselves in
• seeking a framework for researching across institutions and borders, with or without permission from an authoritative body, in the name of mutual aid, solidarity, and the continuation of research

See Appendix 1 for some examples of community publishing projects and how they model different aspects of the publishing workflow.

Self-publishing is typically more labor than working with publishers, but for some people, it meets their goals and needs better. This guide talks about how to manage the shift in labor and resources to produce a high-quality, self-published, co-authored paper or other academic output.

There are plenty of open access (OA) publishers that provide access to academic articles at no cost to readers, so what are some of the incentives for taking on the work of a do-it-yourself publication? Whether you decide to self-publish or work with a publisher depends on your goals and your needs.

Sovereignty

Community publishing can afford full ownership of and control of the editing, publishing, and outreach process. You will choose how to proceed at every step of the workflow: what publishing and typesetting platforms to use, how to manage peer review, what your timeline will be, how you will perform outreach, and more. Sovereignty is empowering, but the trade-off is doing and coordinating the labor that an established publisher would normally perform.

The submission process is completely cut out of the picture in a self-publishing project. Authors don’t have to evaluate potential publishers to find a good and reputable fit. Sometimes reaching aligned communities is even better served by self-publishing, where access is expanded and controlled by the author.

Authors do not have to wait for permission to publish. They can avoid all the big feelings that come along with submission processes. Sovereignty can lend more enthusiasm, agency, creative energy, and spiritual connection to your work. Doing something because you feel the innate desire to do it feels authentic.

Experimentation and Flexibility

Self-publishing removes restrictions on presentation of the work and its research data, and eliminates the submission process altogether. But it adds editing, layout, coordinating, and publicity labor to the authors’ plate, labor that is performed by hardworking editors and designers when going a traditional publishing route.

You can experiment with new workflows, new output mediums, and new ways of reaching audiences when you self-publish. For example, there are few journals that administer open community peer review.

Willingness to take on essential non-writing labor

Established publishers take on the labor of outreach, copyediting, and typesetting. They require structures to organize and manage submissions. Authors must learn to deliver work within those structures, no matter how idiosyncratic they are. Publishers designate which platforms to use, and these platforms may or may not be the best options for your work. Publishers support marketing and outreach within the limits of their own communications policies and practices.

You may be able to pick and choose just “how” DIY you go, based on the interests and capacity of your author group. You may seek a small amount of funding for a consultant to complete one portion of the work such as data analysis, editing, or web design. You may seek partnerships with allied organizations that have infrastructure to share, such as hosting your work in an organization’s repository and acknowledging them as co-publisher.

Developing connections

The learning outcomes are different when self-publishing than working with a publisher. When working with a publisher, you will improve your writing through a professional editor and usually a blind peer review process.^[1] When writing openly in community with others, you will improve your writing and understanding of the subject by co-editing with your author group, which can bring deep insights into the work, and co-editing with a community of practice, which extends the reach and further improves the work. You will learn things along the way from your co-authors and community editors.

The longer you work in community with each other, the more likely you are to build your own small community of practice. Communities of practices develop knowledge and nurture their members through solidarity and resilience. You will likely think of each other when similar questions come up later in your career. You may find yourself working with some of these colleagues again. You now have a group of people you can turn to for asking advice on whatever topic you just developed together. People spend years trying to crack the code of professional networking cliques to find their people, and you’re doing it for free, without the risk of catching COVID, while producing something valuable and enhancing your professional network. These are all happy side effects of community self-publishing.

Cost

Cost can be a factor in deciding to self-publish. Sometimes there are fees to publish in open access journals, although there are several interventions designed to mitigate cost to authors especially if they are affiliated with a large university.^[2]

Collaborative self-publishing can cost $0 if the authors are particularly comfortable with open source software and developing their own tools. But for most groups, access to word processing and desktop publishing software is required. For readers who work at an organization, you may have access to software that you can use in your project. The Platforms section lists several options for paid and “free” (like a puppy!) software. The Projects with a Budget section discusses funding projects.

Imperfection and Iteration

Qualities of the published product such as formatting, typo-free text, marketing effort, or repository metadata completeness can vary because it depends on the capacities, strengths, and weaknesses of the collective. The abilities of the collective may be different from your own individual strengths and weaknesses, so accepting imperfection is important for successful collaborative work.

The guide explains in detail how to go about self-publishing your work, but you will likely need to determine what minimum viable labor looks like for your project’s goals. You may not need to comprehensively take all the steps outlined in the guide. It is okay to intentionally not put much in and not get much out for a quick prototype or idea or light research you wanted to throw out there to see if it resonates but don’t want to put a lot of up-front time in working on.

There is technically no drop-dead date after which the work cannot be changed, which makes publishing with imperfections more comfortable. Since you often have control over the infrastructure in self-publishing, fixing mistakes or updating post-publication is possible. Some projects, like the Digital Library Federation Born-Digital Access Working Group’s Levels of Born Digital Access, develop a sustainability plan to invite updates or new iterations of the work in the future. Jonny Saunders’s “Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)Science” includes a commenting mechanism with updates made over time at the author’s discretion.

Publishing too hastily and taking on a lot of editing debt is not an efficient workflow, so there is a balance between accepting imperfection and planning to iterate. But in a world where we are driven to unhelpful levels of perfection, remember that getting your work out there is enough: your knowledge is useful for others to learn from despite typos or a couple errant tracked-and-accepted-changes gone wrong.

Engagement

In my experience, having people with different perspectives, at different points in their career, review a work gives it a well-rounded review. Releasing the work early and asking people to engage also draws attention to it, building your community of learners / users before your product is released. Some community members may anticipate and make time for reviewing the document after getting a sneak peak in the Community Review phase.

Outreach is a well-understood task in my discipline (information science), where our primary goal is to connect people to information. We must spread the word about the services we offer early and often. Many librarians, archivists, and other academics practice everyday outreach via social media in their personal and often professional lives, too. While some publishers have excellent marketing reach to their general audiences, you may not have control over where or how your work is marketed. This is one benefit of producing and sharing a DIY publication. Only you can reach your network using the framing that you prefer, and your network is the people who are interested in your work.