(With thanks to Carlos Marin, Colombia, who posted this on HIFA-Spanish)
Read a review of the book online: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/10/24/who-should-con... [includes link to the full open-access book]
Extracts below:
'In Publishing Beyond the Market, Samuel A. Moore examines the ills of a marketised system of academic publishing that can justify charging over £9000 for a single paper and outlines how commons-based approaches could be an alternative. Readers will have much to gain from the book’s theorisation and championing of scholar-led publishing, writes Thomas A. Graves.
'Why make publications open access? Who benefits from the current systems of open access academic publishing? How does the marketisation of open access affect scholarship? How can open access be reoriented according to the research needs and academic freedom of scholars, rather than large corporate publishers?...
'Chapter three captures the heart of Moore’s argument, and his solution to the marketisation of scholarly publishing. In it, he explores how groups of scholars have worked to set up their own non-profit scholar-led academic journals, working predominantly on the voluntary labour of academics, with a researcher-oriented, rather than market-oriented publishing agenda. The chapter also looks into how these groups have operated diamond OA systems, whereby neither the author nor the reader pays for the published version to be publicly accessible...
'The conclusion takes this argument beyond open access. He suggests that the horizontal, localised, and “scaled-small” methods of governance used by scholar-led journals could usefully be extended to broader systems of academic governance...
'However, there are two key criticisms I would make of Moore’s proposed solutions to the problems of marketised OA publishing. One of these is located in his diagnosis of the problem. If prestige journals are still valued highly by academics, then why would they switch to publishing in scholar-led journals? The second is that Moore’s approach to bottom-up, community driven solutions to OA and Higher Education governance would not be sufficient to overcome the large-scale problems of marketisation in OA and Higher Education...'
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org