Within the field of open access (OA) publishing, community-led publishing projects are experimenting increasingly with new forms of collaboration and organisation. They do so by focusing on setting up horizontal alliances between independent projects within a certain sector (e.g., scholar-led presses), or vertically across sectors with other not-for-profit organisations (e.g., through collaborations with libraries, universities, and funders), in order to create multi-stakeholder ecologies within scholarly publishing. Yet at the same time, imaginaries for future modes of OA knowledge production are still controlled through demands for ‘scalability’ and ‘sustainability’, which are both seen as preconditions for scholarly communication models and practices to succeed and to be efficient. But they are also prerequi­sites to receive funding for publishing projects or infrastructure development. The scalability of open models is perceived as essential to compete in a landscape dominated by a handful of major corporate players.Drawing on our work with the Radical Open Access Collective, the ScholarLed consortium, and the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Mono­graphs (COPIM) project, this article outlines an alternative organisational prin­ciple for governing community-led publishing projects based on mutual reliance, care, and other forms of commoning. Termed ‘scaling small’, this principle eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale. Instead, it puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community-driven pro­jects that promote a bibliodiverse ecosystem while providing resilience through resource sharing and other kinds of collaboration. Following Anna Tsing’s recom­mendations to keep in mind how reimagining our knowledge practices requires we pay particular attention to articulations between the scalable and the nonscalable (Tsing, 2012), what is needed to enable this is, first and foremost, a rethinking of existing systems and infrastructures and how they currently function – systems that have historically developed and been continuously remade to encourage fur­ther scalability. We further explore the possibilities of scaling small with particular reference to Anna Tsing’s work on the ‘latent commons’ and Massimo De Angelis’ discussion of ‘boundary commoning’, examining how these concepts are on display within the Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed and the COPIM project. As we will argue, reimagining the relations within publishing beyond a mere calcula­tive logic, i.e., one that is focused on assessing the sustainability of alternative models, is essential in not-for-profit OA publishing environments, particularly if we want new forms of collaboration to arise and to redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings.

中文翻译：

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缩放小；或者如何设想知识生产的新关系

在开放获取 (OA) 出版领域，社区主导的出版项目正在越来越多地尝试新的协作和组织形式。他们通过专注于在特定部门（例如，学者主导的出版社）内的独立项目之间建立横向联盟，或与其他非营利组织（例如，通过与图书馆、大学和资助者的合作）垂直跨部门来做到这一点)，以便在学术出版中创建多方利益相关者生态系统。然而与此同时，对未来开放获取知识生产模式的想象仍然受到对“可扩展性”和“可持续性”的需求的控制，这两者都被视为学术交流模式和实践成功和高效的先决条件。但它们也是获得出版项目或基础设施开发资金的先决条件。开放模型的可扩展性被认为对于在少数主要企业参与者主导的环境中竞争至关重要。利用我们与 Radical Open Access Collective、ScholarLed 联盟和社区主导的专着开放出版基础设施 (COPIM) 的合作) 项目，本文概述了一种替代组织原则，用于管理基于相互依赖、关心和其他形式的共享的社区主导的出版项目。这一原则被称为“规模小”，它避开了组织发展的标准方法，这些方法倾向于通过规模经济来扁平化社区多样性。反而，它提出了这样一种想法，即可以通过社区驱动的项目之间的有意合作来培养规模，这些项目可以促进图书馆多样化的生态系统，同时通过资源共享和其他类型的合作提供弹性。遵循 Anna Tsing 的建议，牢记重新构想我们的知识实践需要我们特别注意可扩展和不可扩展之间的衔接（Tsing，2012 年），要实现这一点，首先需要重新思考现有系统和基础设施以及它们目前的运作方式 - 历史上已经开发并不断改造以鼓励进一步可扩展性的系统。我们进一步探索了缩小规模的可能性，特别参考了 Anna Tsing 关于“潜在公地”的工作和 Massimo De Angelis 对“边界公地”的讨论，研究了这些概念是如何在 Radical Open Access Collective、ScholarLed 和COPIM 项目。正如我们将要论证的那样，重新构想出版中的关系，超越单纯的计算逻辑，即专注于评估替代模型的可持续性，在非营利 OA 出版环境中至关重要，特别是如果我们想要新的合作形式兴起并重新定义公共环境中学术出版的未来。