Presentation draft delivered at Oxford University on 4 March 2026
I. Frame the Problem
One possible way of framing the current poly-crises of academia is as a significant and structural failure of imagination. A failure of imagination is found in reducing a university as a space for workforce preparedness, thereby allowing for uncritical technological adoption - vis a vis their unquestionable inevitability, as we are sitting somewhere neutral and a-political, with a function of degree conferral. A failure of imagination is present in an inability to express or gesture toward the value and import of a space that brings people together for the purpose of sharing knowledge.
A failure of imagination is a failure in articulating a vision for the present and future of the university.
And so instead we get management and surveillance and seek to flatten the contributions of the people who make up a university into metrics compressed into spreadsheets for accounting.
Datafication willfully unsees every moment of understanding that happens in this place - because it happens between people and on small scales. And once we stop regarding people, once their unique human-ness has no spot on our charts, we stop hearing them, we lose their presence, and they become disposable.
If a failure of imagination is a failure to envision then it is also a loss of belief. In one another and in the future. And if we follow that road, where we no longer trust our neighbors and colleagues and we no longer trust in the possibility of a better day to come, all that is left to do, if you find yourself in the right position, is to extract, get what you can, and get out. And we can clearly witness those attendant effects of a looting of the university: punching down, the infantilization of students, massive work related burnout, the loss of autonomy and diversity.
But we know better.
I want to tell you about two experiments that we are undertaking in and around Utrecht University that seek to re-centre people as the heart of the University. These might be understood as commoning or collectivizing, they might be building communities - but what they also are, implicitly, is critique of the failure of imagination that pervades scholarship.
And I want to make the case that this, in the end, can be the purpose of Open Science. Not just a movement or a practice, or an alternative set of metrics, or a declaration to be signed. Open Science, or Open Scholarship is a lens of critique on the institution. A way to build a form of understanding, a poetics, toward a university that we imagine together, everyone.
II. Cooperative Open University Publishing
Let’s start with publishing, let’s wag the dog. We know academic publishing impacts every aspect of scholarly culture - there’s a reason Open Access serves as the precursor to Open Scholarship. Communicating research is a consequential act of making known and useful and accessible and actionable.
The way we share information has profound implications for the way we form a society. A university is one of the critical conduits for information sharing - along with media and government - to sanctify meaning and establish a community based on trust. But we messed up.
We alienated ourselves from the process. We let in other parties, who had different needs and understandings of the world, to manage our publishing work. And so we end up with organisations that seek to frack every aspect of the research communication process - that is to extract a profit in every conceivable nook and crack within publishing - promoting an knowable glut of writings without much accountability, becoming what Sarah Lamdan calls Data Cartels, and more recently leveraging AI not as a technology really but as what Sonja Drimmer calls a permission structure for extractive modes of profit. This is all to say we lost trust.
And so, a few years back, we developed something of an organisational vision.
I had just come from Austin, Texas where communities of artists work together to realize each other’s projects. You play drums on my record, I’ll play guitar on your record, or I’ll do the mastering if for you if you help me record or illustrate the album art, and we’ll help each other book some shows and so on.
And I was now working at Copim, where I was tasked with developing business models that could better support scholar-led publishing. And a couple of us - Ellie Gerakopolu and myself - settled on the idea of cooperatives, that we could self-organize into collectives to share labor and realize one another’s projects. This meant mapping out and reintegrating all of the labor that went in to scholarly publishing, this meant making space for forms and work we haven’t yet anticipated. So we wrote and shared information about this emerging idea.
A couple years later, I realize a bit of branding and form for this model. I call it Cooperative Open University Publishing, on which I make an argument that the time for implementation has arrived, due to 1) the maturity of our digital infrastructures - there are a lot of tools out there to publish scholarship and they’re quite good! 2) Widespread literacy of the publishing process and their ethical implications - people just understand what it means to publish with certain entities and in certain venues in a way that that was just not present 10 years ago when I started working in Open Access. And as a result of the first two: 3) New forms and content for scholarly publishing - we’re willing to try new things, accept new things in the midst of a collapsing system and new potentialities. Blog post? Scholarship. Podcast? Scholarship. Multimodal installation? Scholarship. And, as a librarian, because our capacity for metadata and persistent identifiers were emerging and flexible enough to recognise these works, the barriers to entry had changed. The gatekeeping was changing. And that leads to 4) an emerging landscape of people at knowledge organisations who could cooperatively undertake the work of publishing. In the name of Open Science, Dutch Universities brought in data stewards and community managers and research engineers - all of these people will the skills and capacity to open up the way we make public and communicate the work going on within our institutions.
After a year or so of giving talks on this model - arguing for its efficacy and immediacy, an opportunity arises to put this into practice. There is a wide understanding of Dutch academia as being on the forefront of Open Science. How this happened is that back in 2017 or so, groups of researchers got together to talk about and help one another figure out, this new thing called OS. Those gatherings became bigger and organised into Open Science Communities, which pop up across the country and are now international. The researchers did not organise by institution but by region so OSCU contains Utrecht University but also the school of applied sciences and university for humanistic studies and design school and theological seminary. And by congregating in that way, researchers began to tell the university how they want to work and find pathways to reorganise. And the university administrations said, “oh wow great let’s bring this in and make it structural!”
But once Open Science becomes the University’s, the OSCs lose a bit of their air. And so what to do to make these communities empowered once again? For the past year we have been working on the social and technical infrastructure for OSCU Publishing. We wrote something of an introduction or manifesto to the project and went around to different faculties and institutions explaining the vision to researchers.
And just about a year ago, Julien Tacquet completed work on a publishing environment for the Louvre. I find it quite beautifully designed, lightweight, and flexible. And as part of that contract, the publishing system, which is called Velour, is made free and open source. So, now, Julien is working with us to implement an instance of Velour for OSCU Publishing.
We have our first book in process, a collection of texts of course addressing the question of “What is Open Science, really?” And as people begin to see the possibilities of this model, it activates their imagination. And suddenly we have proposals for a number of new works. Their ability to be published will not be based on a question of whether their idea passes someone’s gatekeeping standards, but rather whether or not the idea’s originators can organise the labour and get enough collective participation from their colleagues to see the project through.
And so we mean to both publish interesting and collectively driven works as much as we mean to help people realize that they have the ability and capacity within their institutions to publish. We can regain not only our shared understanding, but bring about what Sam Moore and Janneke Adema discuss as academic citizenship - build stronger bonds amongst each other and our publics.
III. Library School
Library School is a story about what is possible when you build trust within your organisation.
One of the greatest things that Utrecht University has done in recent years - partly in the name of Open Science - is eliminate the distinction among scholarly staff and support staff. Realizing that we all have a critical role to play in the production of knowledge, and realizing that structural hierarchies can and do inhibit that production, Utrecht University released a new policy naming all of those people as colleagues on equal footing.
It’s great news for the library, where people like me sit. I hold a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in language and literature, and the whole of my training and experiences in academia come to bear upon my work in the library. So there is now a framework for my contribution. My colleague and co-contributor on this presentation, Anton Bruder, studied at Cambridge with a PhD in Renaissance book history. And there are indeed many people at Utrecht who have diverse experiences and expertise when it comes to library work that can find a home in this place.
But the movement from policy to practice takes effort and intention.
And so in recognizing the challenges around us those I alluded to at the start, my colleague and I began having discussions about the state of the university and what it could be - imagining, that is. Imagining how we share information, how we conceive of the university in terms of emerging technologies, imagining new ways to articulate the import and weight of the library.
And as our conversations progressed we thought, well more people should be involved in these conversations and we should have them on a regular basis. So we sketched out a few plans, and we relied on design rather than explanation. We shared an image or two inviting people to join us without further explanation. We wanted to leave plenty of space for people to see themselves in this. We began sharing these images over the summer, to let the imagination wander. And not just to library staff, but to researchers and students and academics in Amsterdam and folks we know who live in Utrecht and have nothing to do with education. “All are welcome,” is our consistent refrain.
And on a Thursday in the second week of September, to a room filled with people, some of whom brought baked goods, we met to discuss metaphors for the library. And we have met roughly every two weeks since in one of our two library locations.
And we have a class. We have a topic, loosely construed, sometimes a reading to pull things in a certain direction, but the gravity often shifts, and we continue to leave enough space for people to talk about whatever they want, with a trust in one another and in ourselves, that we can come away with greater understanding.
Sometimes the room is full, sometimes no one shows up, a lot of times we find ourselves talking about AI - not because we find it a useful technology but because conversations around AI call us to reconsider ever aspect of education and research. We maintain the space, and we would be having these conversations anyway, but we find a way to imbue them with new meaning.
But as we continue with these experiments, something funny happens. We have a seminar, an idea for publishing, then we start to think about our discussions and other forms of communication and publishing. Then we start to think about bringing people in who might be further afield, and how can we create a communication structure to get further participation. And before you know it you have the beginnings of a journal, maybe a conference, other forms of expression, like a radio - and you start to turn to your colleagues and neighbors and say, like Paul Simon once did, “hey you know that’s quite astute, why don’t we get together and call ourselves an institute.”
IV. A Poetics for Infrastructural Salvage
In the face of a structural failure of imagination, I say we are called to think more expansively, to imagine more ways of salvaging the incredible social, physical, and digital infrastructures that we have at our institutions. Truly, we at Utrecht can look around and feel overwhelmed with how brilliant and thoughtful everyone is, we have the responsibility of hundreds of years of building knowledge in our physical spaces, and we have these ridiculous machines that allow us to share knowledge in a way that was never before nearly possible in the whole of human history. And all three of those things need to be opened up, made more free. If we can empower them with autonomy and self-confidence - think of how vibrant and powerful our organisations might be.
Stuart Lawson wrote that the purpose of a university is emancipation.
If theirs is a failure of imagination, then we are compelled to imagine more, to take a long view, to envision entire new systems - salvaging the infrastructures that begin to point the way. And if we can have these visions and articulate them, we get to tell a different story about the University. And if we start to produce a narrative of the University, we get to rethink its culture and operations, and, ultimately, our institutional governance.
We are all familiar with that triangle for culture change within institutions that is rolled out at every conference. I want to suggest strongly here a structural flaw in the design of that triangle. Somewhere between “Make it Easy” and “Make it Required” we missed a the crucial step that determines whether the change we wish to develop is significant, lasting, and inclusive: “Make it Meaningful.” We build new infrastructures with people to see themselves in, to spark imaginations, and collectively set out to fulfill those visions.
A university is an unceasing ever expanding event of learning. Be we are up against compression - a lack of vision and deficiency in narrative that says , “well the University can’t be all of this - it must be efficient and future-proof.”
We don’t need to accept that. There are opportunities to make our own choices.
