Volume 16, Number 1, 2025 Sustainable Publishing Guest-edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Abigail Fields, Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Margot Mellet

EN:

Generative AI in peer review raises ethical and environmental concerns and risks deepening existing inequities in scholarly publishing. Celebrated gains in speed often mask declines in quality and accountability. Training and deploying large models impose environmental costs. In editorial workflows, AI can privilege technical fixes over structural reform, and evidence shows it reproduces human biases while being cast as neutral. We call for a renewed commitment to open-science principles anchored in human oversight, deep sustainability, and broader justice. The paper concludes by interrogating sustainability’s absence from green-economy debates and mapping the values likely to shape the future of peer review.

FR:

Les IA génératives en évaluation par les pairs posent des enjeux éthiques et écologiques et risquent d’accentuer les inégalités de l'édition académique. Les gains de vitesse masquent des reculs de qualité et de responsabilité. L’entraînement et le déploiement des modèles ont des coûts environnementaux. Dans les flux éditoriaux, l’IA privilégie des palliatifs techniques plutôt que des réformes et reproduit des biais tout en se disant neutre. Nous plaidons pour une science ouverte ancrée dans la supervision humaine, la durabilité et la justice, et interrogeons leur absence des discours sur l’« économie verte », avant d’esquisser les valeurs qui guideront l’avenir de l’évaluation.

EN:

In this piece I draw on my experiences as a neuroqueer editor of the peer-reviewed, intersectional, and intermedia independent journal Feral Feminisms and on disability justice to hone a short manifestx on crip publishing. While peer-reviewed journals often demand free, invisible, and feminized labor along with high-speed efficiency, I imagine crip approaches to publishing as necessitating such principles as slowness, anti-fascism, recognition, care, failure, multiple mediums for knowledge-making, and community building. The piece begins with a reflection from the “Bed Sorbonne” or academic’s bed office, and moves into a consideration of how thinking sustainable publishing with lichen can enliven our publishing praxes. Finally, I outline the nine part manifestx as a starting point for imagining crip informed publication models. The hybrid and art-based piece engages with the theme of sustainable publishing by thinking about how to make publishing sustainable—as in doable, feasible, possible, limitless— both for crip authors/creators and crip journal editors.

FR:

Les enjeux liés à la durabilité des dispositifs d'édition dépassent les questions de production des livres imprimés, il y a désormais une urgence à interroger les modes de fabrication avec le numérique, depuis les logiciels jusqu'aux infrastructures techniques de diffusion de la connaissance. Malgré une absence de considération de la pérennité de ces modes d'édition, les outils et autres rouages techniques peuvent être repensés pour prendre en compte les dimensions de durabilité et de sobriété. Le permacomputing, en tant que concept et communauté de pratiques, permet d'explorer des initiatives radicales dans l'usage de l'informatique en contexte limité. Son extension dans le champ de l'édition, le permapublishing, est une opportunité d'identifier et d'analyser des modes d'édition pérennes qui peuvent être partagés, détournés ou étendus, et ce à travers l'élaboration de trois principes structurants : le découplage, la dépréciation et l'autonomisation.

EN:

The sustainability of publishing systems goes far beyond the production of printed books, and there is now an urgent need to examine digital production methods, from software to the technical infrastructures used to disseminate knowledge. Despite a lack of consideration for the durability of these publishing modes, the tools and other technical workings can be rethought to take into account the dimensions of longevity and sobriety. As a concept and a community of practice, permacomputing allows us to explore radical initiatives in the use of computing in a limited context. Its extension into the field of publishing, permapublishing, is an opportunity to identify and analyze sustainable publishing modes that can be shared, hijacked or extended, through the elaboration of three structuring principles: decoupling, deprecation and empowerment.

EN:

In response to the ecological and epistemic crises of the Capitalocene, this paper examines how eco-artist Thijs Biersteker develops tree-media—sensor-driven AI installations that treat trees and fungi not as metaphors or data sources, but as co-authors of environmental knowledge. Through the concept of arbo-real aesthetics, the paper proposes an elemental model of publishing rooted in multispecies reciprocity, latency, and refusal. Biersteker’s installations resist extractive AI paradigms by staging alternative epistemologies grounded in vegetal sensing, seasonal rhythms, and symbiotic time. Analyzing six installations produced between 2018 and 2024, the paper theorizes how these works enact a compostable media logic—one that unsettles mastery and reimagines publishing as a sensory, ethical, and relational process. Rather than offering techno-utopian solutions, the installations inhabit the Promethean paradox: they critique digital extractivism while operating within its constraints. As a prescriptive intervention, the paper introduces Listening with Trees, a three-day pedagogical prototype that speculatively translates these insights into multispecies publishing practices. By publishing with trees—through slowness, decay, and co-authorship—this model offers a low-carbon, speculative alternative to academic and AI-driven knowledge systems in the age of the Chthulucene.

EN:

In this piece Anne Pasek and Aksel Biørn-Hansen interview each other on their respective experiments in zine-based experimental research exchange: DIY Methods, an annual conference-by-postal-mail, and Liminal Excavations, a zine-based intervention at ICT4S (Information and Communication Studies for Sustainability) 2024. They reflect on practical lessons they’ve learned in facilitating alternative publishing for academic research as well as some of the ways print helps make the environmental, cultural, and emotional character of scholarly norms both easier to analyze and contest.

FR:

Dans cet article, Anne Pasek et Aksel Biørn-Hansen s'entretiennent mutuellement de leurs expériences respectives en matière d'échange de recherches expérimentales basées sur des zines : DIY Methods, une conférence annuelle par courrier postal, et Liminal Excavations, une intervention sous forme de zine à ICT4S 2024. Ils réfléchissent aux leçons pratiques qu'ils ont apprises en facilitant l'édition alternative pour la recherche universitaire, ainsi qu'à certaines des façons dont l'impression aide à rendre le caractère environnemental, culturel et émotionnel des normes savantes à la fois plus facile à analyser et à contester.