For decades, the scholarly publishing system has rightly been critiqued for perpetuating inequity, pricing out the public and the underfunded, and enshrining rigid formats that often exclude innovation and marginalized voices. While open access (OA) once promised to democratize scholarly communication, it has, in many cases, become as commercialized as traditional publishing: a pay-to-publish system hampered by the same gatekeeping, just under a different economic model.
And paywalls don’t just exclude readers through cost; they also limit awareness and discoverability, keeping research outputs invisible to much of the public. As Melissa H. Cantrell and Lauren Collister argued in their recent discussion of the “wicked problem” of scholarly publishing, incremental change is unlikely to resolve these systemic flaws.
Many innovative scholarly publishers have already experimented with parts of this system—from diamond OA journals built on volunteer labor, to platforms like PubPeer testing new modes of peer review, to metadata librarians refining discovery systems. But these efforts are scattered and piecemeal.
If we are serious about addressing these problems, we need to stop tinkering around the edges. What if the inspiration for a more inclusive, decentralized, and participatory publishing platform came not from within the academy, but from the world of fanfiction? Yes, fanfiction.