Call for Papers: “In Defense of the Commons” communication +1, vol 12 Guest edited by Zachary McDowell, Steve Jankowski, and Matthew Vetter
**Premise** As the Internet becomes more and more of a walled garden, projects like Wikipedia, fondly known as “the last best place on the Internet,” were founded on the utopian promise of a decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary model for creating and sharing “the sum of all human knowledge." Wikipedia remains a shining example of the digital “commons” — repositories of knowledge and information that have become infrastructural layers that support the Internet as we know it. Beyond Wikipedia and its sister projects, the digital commons also includes open source software projects (Debian, Pubpub), shadow libraries that circulate publicly-financed research, and interoperable interfaces (like RSS feeds, APIs). These institutional mechanisms of content, whether knowledge, data, multimedia, or code, eschew exclusive traditional methods of property rights in favor of social governance, harnessing diverse, non-market motivations to create shared public goods.
However, the ideal of the commons as an open, equitable, and self-regulating space exists under constant pressure, for many reasons. Internally, these projects are not the "mythical egalitarian space" they are often described as. They are characterized by power asymmetries, systemic biases, and complex bureaucracies that can exclude newcomers and marginalized communities who may wish to negotiate and challenge established norms. Externally, the knowledge commons has long been threatened by corporate free-riding. Today, new forms of this concern have arisen with extraction and enclosure of the commons through large language models (LLMs) which repurpose volunteer labor and open data in ways that may undermine the sustainability of the projects themselves.
In light of these concerns about inaccessibility, inequity, and encroachment, we seek to bring together critical scholarship that examines the sociotechnical, political, and ethical challenges facing digital knowledge commons today. In coordination with the “Critical Commons Research Network” (https://criticalcommonsresearch.net/), communication +1 is accepting proposals for a special issue "In Defiance of the Commons / In Defense of the Commons." We invite contributions that not only diagnose the problems but also explore the strategies of resistance, repair, and rehabilitation necessary to sustain these vital public resources. We are interested in work that follows controversies, uncovers hidden infrastructures, and listens to the voices of the communities that build and maintain the commons.
We welcome submissions from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives that address, but are not limited to, themes around governance, power, and bureaucracy in the commons, including issues of governance capture, automated systems, and divergent governance models; bias, exclusion, and the politics of representation, including editorial and informational biases, systemic issues, knowledge organization, and strategies of resistance; and the commons in the broader information ecosystem and infrastructure as it comes into contact with enclosures from two opposing ends: the systems of intellectual property that seek to restrain public use and the corporate LLM systems that are continuing the legacy of platformisation by positioning themselves as the de facto governors and gatekeepers of our common knowledge. We especially encourage approaches inspired by or relating to the above concerns to the physical, environmental, or generally “public” commons as well (forestry, fisheries, mining, public health, etc.), which might help bridge conversations between seemingly disparate disciplines. Ultimately, this CFP seeks to understand not just what is at stake with contemporary shifts in how the commons is being exploited, but also to promote the actions, materials, and imaginations needed to increase the sustainability, longevity, and resilience of the digital commons.
**Submission Details** Please submit proposals of 500-1000 words (maximum) to communicationplusone@gmail.commailto:communicationplusone@gmail.com by January 15th. Authors will be invited to submit full-length manuscripts around the beginning of February, with full papers due May 15th. Full papers may vary in length but typically range from 6,000 to 9,000 words (excluding references). This issue will be published in the Fall of 2026.
**about communication +1** Since 2011, communication +1 has operated as a diamond open-access journal, publishing fee-free for both authors and readers.
The aim of communication +1https://communicationplusone.org/ is to promote new approaches to and open new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship, communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to create a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these experiments.
For more information, please visit communicationplusone.orghttp://communicationplusone.org/.
**Bibliography** Cooke, Richard. "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet." Wired, (February 1, 2020). https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-online-encyclopedia-best-place-interne...
Fuchs, Christian. “The Digital Commons and the Digital Public Sphere: How to Advance Digital Democracy Today.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16, no. 1 (March 22, 2021). https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.917.
Reeves, Neal, Wenjie Yin, and Elena Simperl. “Exploring the Impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia Engagement.” Collective Intelligence 4, no. 3 (2025): 26339137251372599. https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137251372599.
Pentzold, Christian. “Mundane Work for Utopian Ends: Freeing Digital Materials in Peer Production.” New Media & Society 23, no. 4 (April 1, 2021): 816–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954203.
Vetter, Matthew A., Jialei Jiang, and Zachary J. McDowell. “An Endangered Species: How LLMs Threaten Wikipedia’s Sustainability.” AI & SOCIETY, February 19, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02199-9.
**advisory board** Sean Johnson Andrews, Columbia College Chicago Lisa Åkervall, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Nathalie Casemajor, University of Québec Outaouais Jimena Canales, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Bernard Geoghegan, Kings College, London Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University, Denmark John Durham Peters, Yale University Amit Pinchevski,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Florian Sprenger, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder Christina Vagt, University of California Santa Barbara Greg Wise, Arizona State University
Love and respect, and RIP to our advisory board member, Johnathan Sterne. Thank you for everything.
Matt Vetter, PhD (he/him) Professor of English Dept. of Language, Literature, and Writing Indiana University of Pennsylvania http://mattvetter.nethttp://mattvetter.net/
Connect with me on Zoom, https://iupvideo.zoom.us/my/dr.vetterzooms
Managing co-editor, Writing Spaceshttp://www.writingspaces.org/ Co-chair, CCCC Wikipedia Initiativehttps://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/wikipedia-initiative/
Available as open access ebook, Wikipedia and the Representation of Realityhttps://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003094081/wikipedia-representation-reality-zachary-mcdowell-matthew-vetter?_ga=189031735.1692740009&_gl=1*lff2jh*_ga*MTg5MDMxNzM1LjE2OTI3NDAwMDk.*_ga_0HYE8YG0M6*MTY5Mjc0MDAxMC4xLjAuMTY5Mjc0MDAxMi4wLjAuMA..