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Samuel A. Moore is the author of the open access book, Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (University of Michigan Press, 2025). He is the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Libraries, Associate Lecturer at Cambridge Digital Humanities, and College Research Associate at King’s College, Cambridge. The interview below with Charles Watkinson, the publisher, was recorded, transcribed and lightly edited.

Charles Watkinson:

Okay, Sam, if you could start by just giving your name and affiliation please?

Sam Moore:

Yes, of course. I’m Sam Moore. I’m the scholarly communications specialist at the University of Cambridge, and also an associate lecturer in digital humanities at Cambridge.

Charles Watkinson:

Thank you very much. You are the author of Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons. Why did you decide to write Publishing Beyond the Market?

Sam Moore:

The book grows out of my PhD. I was very interested in open access and how it was reshaping publishing. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen publishing—particularly journal publishing—moving toward open access. I wanted to understand what that shift was doing to the ecosystem: how it affected commercial models, and how it impacted academics.

When I started the PhD, many funders were releasing policies to ensure that the research they supported would be open access. I wanted to ask: why were funders so invested in this, what did they want from open access, and what were the broader impacts? What I found was that the outcomes were not always positive. These policies tended to reinforce commercial models of publishing and often discouraged experimentation. They also set up open access as something to be complied with rather than explored for its own sake.

At the same time, however, there was a vibrant world of more experimental, community-driven publishing. The book juxtaposes these two sides: the policy-driven, commercially oriented systems, and the community-led initiatives.

Because policy shifts so quickly, I also updated the book to look at more recent developments—particularly “Plan S,” the major EU-backed open access policy—and considered them through the lens of the commons, which I explore throughout the book.

Charles Watkinson:

Let’s talk about the commons. What do you mean when you say a scholarly commons, which is a core concept of the book? Why is this idea of a collective endeavor so resonant, particularly for the arts, humanities, and social sciences?

Sam Moore:

The commons can mean different things, and the book explores these meanings. Sometimes it’s used vaguely, as a feel-good idea that “we all share things together.” But I use it in a more specific sense. The commons—and the practice of commoning—refer to how communities self-organize to create, maintain, and manage resources that matter to them. There’s a long history of this, especially outside the global north, and commoning reflects an opportunity for a less marketized mode of production.

In the context of scholarly communication, the commons refers to communities maintaining things like journals or presses for non-commercial reasons. The goal isn’t profit but sustaining knowledge-sharing in other community-led ways. In the book, I explore presses that are part of the Radical Open Access Collective, all of whom being organized by working academics and sustained without recourse to commercial processes.

These presses provide a useful counterpoint to how publishing has been marketized over the last 40–50 years. Academic publishing used to be understood as something subsidized by universities or the state, not something expected to generate profit. Marketization has shaped which kinds of books and journals get published.

The commons model says: publishing doesn’t need to be profit-driven. It can be sustained in different ways by communities supporting one another. It’s simply another way of imagining how we create and circulate knowledge.

Charles Watkinson:

You mentioned this idea of non-market driven approaches for funding and sustaining open access publishing. How do you see these models aligning with the public mission of academic institutions, like the ones that we’re both sitting in today?

Sam Moore:

One way to think about it is to look back at the mid-20th-century tradition of the university press, especially in North America, when presses were heavily subsidized. That’s essentially what I’m arguing for: providing resources so that people can produce and share knowledge simply because it’s valuable to do so.

Of course, things are different today and there is clearly less money to go round. But in the UK, some of these practices have been reintegrated into universities through the open access agenda. Government funding for open access has enabled a revival of sorts—a new generation of university presses that echo the older subsidized model but do so on the basis of open access.

Beyond that, there are many experimental models being tested. For example, libraries collectively funding open access books, or other collaborative, less commercialized approaches. These don’t always eliminate market pressures, but they soften their effects and create space for more ethical publishing practices.

Charles Watkinson:

Experimentation is tightly related to this concept of bibliodiversity as well. Thinking again from an institutional resource lens, how can universities and libraries provide effective support for authors who are precarious or loosely affiliated with those institutions, or maybe authors who are completely outside academia? What are some strategies to address the fact that institutions aren’t where everything is happening?

Sam Moore:

That’s a really important question. Many of the members of the Radical Open Access Collective are para-academics—not formally employed by universities, but working in and around them. The collective also includes academics who run presses alongside their regular roles.

These kinds of scholar-led presses are particularly good at supporting precarious or independent researchers because they deliberately avoid exclusionary practices like high book or article processing charges. By operating outside commercial logics, they can be more equitable.

Sustaining this work is difficult, since they don’t generate significant revenue. But starting from a commitment to equity and bibliodiversity is, I think, the right approach. It contrasts with commercial publishing, which tends to operate on a “pay-to-play” model and then offers limited waivers to those deemed unable to pay.

Ultimately, universities should support these community-led initiatives—especially in the humanities and social sciences—because they nurture diversity, experimentation, and research for its own sake.

Charles Watkinson:

Now, coming down to the level of the industry. An individual academic, for example. What practically could an individual author or an individual scholar do to effectively reclaim control of this system and foster this more “equitable and caring” system for scholarly communication? At the level of the individual.

Sam Moore:

There are quite a few things individuals can do. Much of scholarly publishing depends on volunteer labor, whether that’s writing, editing, or peer review. At the moment, most of that free labor goes to commercial publishers. But scholars can redirect it to community-led initiatives—by peer-reviewing for them, joining editorial boards, or submitting work.

Even if you feel you need to publish in prestigious journals for career reasons, publishing doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. You can submit one article to a high-impact journal, and another to a scholar-led press. Or, if you can’t risk submitting, you can still support them with your labor.

I don’t want to place the full burden on individuals—people need to build careers, and structural change requires more than personal choices. But if academics think carefully about where they put their energy and expertise, they can help strengthen more equitable models alongside the existing system.

Charles Watkinson:

I think we’ve become very caught up in conversations around open access which focus on mechanics and funding. I see your book as taking a step back from that and looking at a beyond open access conversation which gets back to some of the core goals of the movement. Your focus is on the idea of the commons as a self-organization of labor. What does a future transformed scholarly landscape look like to you?

Sam Moore:

I think it’s important to recognize that this will never be a neatly rolled-out plan that replaces commercial publishing. Large publishers aren’t going away. The real question is how to sustain alternative ecosystems.

One idea I developed with my colleague Janneke Adema is “scaling small.” Rather than trying to become big, community-led initiatives can grow by supporting one another—sharing resources, expertise, even personnel. It’s about building networks of mutual care, which collectively become more than the sum of their parts.

That growth is organic and unpredictable, but it strengthens the ecosystem. It doesn’t need to replace commercial publishing, but it can complement it and carve out meaningful space. Policymakers can also play a role, especially as they increasingly recognize the limitations of market-driven open access and start supporting models like Diamond Open Access.

Ultimately, though, these questions tie into the wider future of the university itself. In places like the UK and US, higher education has been under sustained attack and defunding. The struggles of publishing are inseparable from that broader political context.

So the future is messy, but it’s already here: the more people engage with these initiatives, the stronger they become.

Charles Watkinson:

Thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to share about the book, about the ideas that you feel it would be important for people to know and I haven’t covered?

Sam Moore:

Since finishing the book, I’ve been thinking more broadly about open research practices—not just open access to publications, but also sharing data, code, peer review, and so on. When you see openness as a practice, it becomes experimental: it shapes how you do research, not just what you publish at the end.

That perspective allows us to imagine new forms of publishing—books enriched with multimedia, nonlinear articles, collaborative projects, open peer review. Openness can become exciting and generative, rather than just a compliance exercise.

That’s what I’m working on now: how openness can expand research practices in creative ways. I’d encourage readers to think of open access less as a bureaucratic requirement and more as a pathway to experimentation and innovation.

Charles Watkinson:

Thank you very much. That’s very, very compelling. Thank you very much, Sam, for talking about your new book.

Sam Moore:

Not at all—thank you.