The “Publishing Cultures in Transition: Open Access, Critical Digital Literacy, and Digital Infrastructures” call for papers is open until November 14th, 2025. This special issue will be edited by Klaus Rummler, Natalie Marty, and PKP’s Urooj Nizami. The original, full call for papers was published at medienpaed.com.
Theme
In recent years, scholar-led Open Access (OA) journals have emerged as powerful catalysts for reimagining the practices and politics of academic publishing. These journals, especially those who are following the Diamond Open Access model and are grounded in the principle that neither readers nor authors bear publication costs, are more than alternative distribution channels – they are the outcome of critical engagement with exclusionary and commercialized models of scholarly communication.
The Example of Open Journal Systems (OJS by PKP)
The following is entirely quoted from the Medien Pädagogik Call for Papers.
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is best known for developing Open Journal Systems (OJS) – the world’s most widely used journal management and publishing platform. OJS supports over 55.000 active journals in 161 countries, operating in 60 languages – well over half of all scientific journals, issues and papers, worldwide. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, nearly 9 million articles have been published using OJS. These numbers not only reflect broad adoption but also affirm OJS’s role in supporting bibliodiversity, multilingualism, and the global dissemination of research, especially from and about the Global South.
OJS and the broader PKP ecosystem have been described as an archipelago (Nizami 2024): a distributed yet interconnected constellation of journals, institutions, and communities. Each of those publishing initiatives represents a distinct island – locally grounded, self-governed, and responsive to their context – while sharing common infrastructures, values, and dedicated to a commitment to Open Access as a Global Public Good, affirming both sovereignty and solidarity, thus enabling local relevance alongside global collaboration.
Édouard Glissant, the Martinican writer and philosopher, writes powerfully of «archipelagic thinking» (la pensée archipélagique) as a means of using situated practices to connect distinctive contexts. Quoting Glissant from Caribbean Discourse, the scholar An Yountae writes,
For Glissant, the archipelagic imagination views each island [as] embod[ying] openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea. He abolishes the very notion of the universal and the particular, or centre and periphery. (Yountae 2024, 149; quoting Glissant 1989, 139).
While OJS has witnessed widespread global adoption, scholarly engagement with the socio-cultural dimensions of the sea-change toward open platforms in scholarly publishing has yet to be critically explored. Rather than viewing islands as isolated, exotic, or insular, we draw on archipelagic thinking to advocate for a relational approach that integrates localized currents and global horizons. PKP’s mission and vision reflects archipelagic thinking in two key ways: (1) OJS fosters autonomy from dominant, centralized publishing systems, offering a model of distributed sovereignty through free and open source software; and (2) these tools support an ecosystem of bibliodiversity, rejecting a model of extraction from the Global South and setting a new paradigm of exchange and collaboration.
Invitation
We invite contributions that critically examine and celebrate the cultures and practices of scholar-led (Diamond) Open Access publishing as sites of digital literacy, democratization, and knowledge politics. We are particularly interested in works that address the following interrelated themes:
- Critical Engagement with Scholarly Publishing Norms
- Democratization and Equity in Knowledge Production
- Governance, Infrastructures, and Critical (Digital) Literacy
- The Politics and Sustainability of Open Scholarship
- Infrastructures and Ecologies of Scholar-Led Publishing: OJS & PKP in Practice
Details
The Call for Papers is open until November 14th, 2025. For details about the themes, contributions, submission, procedure requirements, quality assurance strategy, publication format, author guidelines, editors, and references, please visit the full announcement.
