Against book enclosures: moving towards more diverse, humane and accessible book publishing

Matthew Gandy's Commentary in Area (2023) criticised the decision of the national funder UKRI to mandate that all books resulting from the research that it funds must be published open access (OA) from 2024. This raises many issues of importance to geographers. We argue that scholars in the discipline need to fight for affordable and ethically produced OA books, not ‘legacy’ modes of publishing. In particular, books produced by scholar-led OA presses will not harm the reputation of departments or individual scholars, and they also have the potential to reduce significant financial barriers to accessing books across the globe. A more powerful critique must be to challenge the continued ‘enclosure’ of books, and the denial of OA by academic publishers and university presses.