Academizines!

A Manifesto

Abstract

The scholarly communications ecosystem is collapsing. Hopelessly polluted by capitalist and neoliberal priorities for research and higher education, the trad publishing ecosystem is now toxic to scholars at every stage of their professional lives. We must abandon this swamp to survive. We must seize the means of scholarly production from corporate publishers and the scholarly journals beholden to them.

Micropublishing has long been the weapon of choice for marginalized and stigmatized communities to combat the oppression of corporate publication. The hegemony of capitalist interests in publishing has silenced and exploited minority creators through tokenistic selection processes and outright censorship.

We reject the premise that micropublishing lacks the rigor of so-called prestige publishing, and further reject corporate metrics for scholarly impact like citation  indices and other quantitative measures, in favor of alternative metrics assessing volume of circulation and engagement, and qualitative means of assessing impact. 

We offer zines as a powerful form of public writing. We believe that creating wider publics for academic scholarship by making our work more accessible is a greater measure of scholarly impact and can improve goodwill for higher education and research in these anti-intellectual times.