Reimagining Robin Hood: Scholarly Publishing as a Site of Struggle
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 30 March 2026
Reimagining Robin Hood: Scholarly Publishing as a Site of Struggle
Wanted.
Not a person, but a principle: that knowledge should be free.
With this poster, the Open Library of Humanities reimagines Robin Hood for scholarly communications, not as a nostalgic figure but as a call to action. “Join the fight to make knowledge free,” it declares, urging institutions to divest from commercial academic publishing and support community-led alternatives instead.
At the Open Library of Humanities, we have been liberating knowledge from subscription-based and commercial models since 2015, when we launched with 7 journals and 100 supporting institutions. More than 10 years later, we have sustained this mission growing to 35 journals, with more joining each year. This has all been made possible thanks to the support of more than 340 library partners.
With this poster, we wanted to return to the core idea behind Robin Hood: taking from the rich and giving to the poor. In the context of scholarly publishing, this translates into divesting from commercialisation and supporting non-profit diamond open access. We commissioned designer Nicky Borowiec and illustrator Joaquin Pereyra to create a piece that conveys this metaphor as a powerful aesthetic. The poster frames scholarly publishing as a site of struggle, using its visual language to position diamond open access as collective action and to present publishing as a question of power and resistance.
What does it mean to make knowledge free?
In a world that often equates open access with the payment of article processing charges (APCs), particularly in the Global North, the answer to this question is far from straightforward. Academic publishing remains monopolised by a handful of big commercial publishers that continue to generate significant profit margins from publicly-funded research. That is why the way open access is implemented is crucial.
When the Budapest Open Access Initiative was launched 25 years ago, there was widespread optimism about the openness the web would bring, opening the door to a new world of shared global knowledge. However, contrary to these expectations, the transition has resulted in a hybrid environment, particularly in the Global North, where traditional subscription models coexist with APC-driven open access traded via big deals and transformative agreements. As Springer Nature executives have acknowledged, these transformative agreements can even generate higher revenues than traditional subscriptions (see this analysis).
A recent blog post by a friend of the OLH, which examines the business strategies of major academic publishers, argues that these companies are “infrastructure landlords”, “moving toward owning more of the environment in which research is produced, evaluated, and used — not just the content within it. The story here isn't that publishers profit from research. It is that they are quietly occupying the infrastructure around it”. They are using AI, data, and integrated platforms to build ecosystems that increase institutional dependency. In a context of budgetary constraints, as we are currently experiencing in the UK with massive cuts to higher education, these bundled, all-in-one service packages can appear appealing. They are seen as easier to manage because they reduce complexity, even though they increase dependency on a small number of companies and contribute to further monopolisation, as noted in the blog post.
Resistance in practice
Libraries are increasingly forced to make difficult decisions about whether to maintain transformative agreements and big deals or to continue supporting scholar-led open access initiatives. Within this context, there is an urgent need to redirect funds away from large commercial organisations and invest them instead in community-owned, non-profit publishing solutions.
Large commercial publishers and service providers have become increasingly unaffordable for libraries operating under already heavily reduced budgets. At the same time, the concentration of resources among a handful of dominant companies makes it harder to sustain a diverse scholarly publishing ecosystem. Under financial pressure, libraries are often pushed towards bundled services which may appear efficient in the short term but ultimately accelerate the monopolisation.
If this trajectory continues, we risk a future in which a small number of commercial publishers and infrastructure providers absorb even more library budgets while exerting greater control over research and the prestige economy that underpins academic careers. This resistance is not only theoretical; it is already happening in practice. Action is needed sooner rather than later. The problem is structural, and the longer it remains unaddressed, the harder it will be to reverse.
Diamond open access offers a viable and equitable alternative. However, mainstreaming it requires a redistribution of existing financial resources away from major commercial publishers and towards non-commercial initiatives.
At the Open Library of Humanities, we have long demonstrated that diamond open access is not only possible but sustainable in the long term. We have supported the transition of subscription journals to diamond open access for more than a decade. One of our earliest examples was Glossa, which moved to OLH ten years ago following the mass resignation of editors from Elsevier’s Lingua, in protest against pressures to impose high author fees and disputes over the journal ownership. Since then, OLH has continued to provide a home for editorial boards seeking non-profit, community-owned publishing solutions.
In recent years, growing dissatisfaction with the exploitative practices of large commercial publishers has sparked a new wave of editorial resignations. Notable examples include the resignation of the editorial boards of Theory and Society from Springer in 2023, Philosophy and Public Affairs from Wiley in 2024, the Journal of Political Philosophy from Wiley in 2025, each in protest against the commercialisation of their titles. A full list of editorial resignations and more context can be accessed in the Open Access Directory’s Journal declarations of independence page.
In response to this broader movement, during Open Access Week 2023 we launched the Zombie Journals campaign, encouraging editors to move their journals away from commercial publishers to non-profit, diamond open access models. The campaign popularised the term zombie journals, referring to titles that continue under commercial publishers after editorial boards have resigned, often with little transparency.
Following the precedent set by Glossa a decade earlier, OLH welcomed many of the successor journals that emerged from these resignations, including Political Philosophy and Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs (both formerly published by Wiley), as well as the recent transition of Philosophical Logic from Springer. Over the past two years alone, OLH has incorporated 14 new journals, including several high-profile transitions from Wiley, Springer and Elsevier.
This not only divests academic resources back into the hands of academic communities, but also demonstrates that, when financial resources are available, diamond open access can successfully flourish. The question remains how best to allocate existing resources in a context of scarcity.
Some universities have begun to walk away from transformative agreements, saving library budgets millions of pounds. While these decisions are often motivated by financial pressures arising from the current higher education crisis in the UK and elsewhere, David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), argues in Research Professional that “vice-chancellors and senior leaders must see this as an opportunity to move away from a failing model to new possibilities.” He further emphasises that “universities should commit to investing a proportion of any savings from cancelling big deals into new initiatives. Only this will remedy the structural imbalances in current models and create a more sustainable model for the future.”
As Caroline Edwards notes in a recent article from Research Professional, the financial crisis facing UK universities has forced librarians to cut costs by hundreds of thousands of pounds annually, and this pressure is especially acute given that the journal packages of the five major academic publishers can consume up to 60 per cent of university library budgets. Commercialisation in scholarly publishing continues to drain millions of pounds from already overstretched library budgets.
Diamond open access, as we have seen, offers a response, and in recent years we have seen institutional and collective efforts to support this transition. Notably, initiatives such as UNESCO’s Global Diamond Open Access Alliance, the European Diamond Capacity Hub, the DIAMAS project, and the ALMASI project are working to strengthen and support community-led, non-profit Diamond OA publishing. Similarly, organisations such as cOAlition S and Science Europe are actively promoting Diamond OA, while in the UK the N8 Research Partnership of northern English universities recently issued a statement calling for urgent reform of scholarly publishing in support of more equitable models.
Action is needed now. It is not only about divesting from commercial publishers, but about actively redistributing resources into non-for-profit scholarly organisations. Systems that are collectively governed and aligned with academic values. In this sense, the Robin Hood poster is more than a visual metaphor; it is a provocation. It asks not only what we stand against, but what we are willing to support. If scholarly publishing is a site of struggle, the question is no longer whether change is needed, but whether we are prepared to redistribute power and resources to make knowledge truly free.
This post was written by Dr Paula Clemente Vega (Community Outreach Manager). Thanks to Professor Caroline Edwards for her edits.
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