We Already Did the Work: A Response to the Academic Publishing Paradox

Why Peer-Reviewed Paywalls Can’t Hold What We’ve Already Built: On Decentralised Knowledge, Autistic Praxis, and the Archive We Made Together

Academic journals gatekeep knowledge. The AutSide builds something else: open, rigorous, needs-based writing shaped by lived experience. We don’t need more prestige—we need trust, access, and solidarity. We already did the work.

Introduction: “Getting Down Off the Soapbox”

A question from James, recently, on LinkedIn.

Since LinkedIn limits replies to a few hundred characters, consider this my extended answer to a post that deserves far more space than the platform allows. James Hardy posed a deceptively simple question: why does academic publishing still dominate, when it clearly fails the researchers, reviewers, and public who uphold it? His post struck a chord—because it names a broken system many of us have felt but few are resourced to challenge. This piece isn’t written to James so much as because of him. It’s a response for all of us who have found ourselves doing deep, rigorous, socially meaningful work outside the gates of institutional academia—often unpaid, unsupported, and unseen. I write not as a critic looking in, but as someone who’s been building something parallel. This is a reframing, and maybe a reclamation. We’ve already done the work. The question now is whether we’re ready to recognise it.

So, here we go.

There’s something disarmingly honest about your post, James—this moment of standing on the proverbial soapbox and asking, not performatively but earnestly: why does academic publishing still dominate, when it makes so little sense? You’ve laid it out plainly—no pay for writers, no pay for reviewers, research locked behind paywalls, copyrights enforced even against the people who generated the knowledge in the first place. It’s absurd on the face of it, and yet somehow still treated as sacrosanct. I don’t think you’re missing anything. In fact, I think you’re seeing it more clearly than most, precisely because you’ve still got enough distance to question it.

The truth is, it doesn’t make sense. Not because it’s broken, but because it was built this way—to extract, to gatekeep, and to serve prestige economies rather than people. But here’s the thing I want to offer in response: the alternative already exists. We’re just not trained to see it as legitimate. Over the past few years, especially from the margins—disabled, neurodivergent, poor, trans—we’ve been building something different. Quietly, messily, but persistently. We’ve been doing the work of interdisciplinary synthesis, historical reframing, structural critique. We’ve just been doing it without the machinery of journals, because most of us were never going to be published there anyway.

So what I want to say, gently but firmly, is that the question isn’t whether there’s a better alternative. It’s whether we’re ready to name, support, and scale what’s already been done.

The Logic of the Journal System – Extraction by Design

Academic publishing doesn’t fail by accident. It succeeds at exactly what it was built to do.

No pay for writing. No pay for reviewing. No funding for the research itself—despite most of it being publicly subsidised through universities or grant bodies. Then, the final insult: no access to the finished product, unless you're rich enough to pay the fees or institutionally credentialed enough to bypass the wall.

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s design. The journal system is an extractive economy dressed up in scholarly drag. It doesn’t reward knowledge creation—it exploits it. It doesn't promote public understanding—it restricts it. And it certainly doesn't serve the communities who need this knowledge most. The few who benefit are those already sitting atop existing hierarchies: tenured faculty in elite institutions, journal editors with reputational capital to trade, publishing conglomerates collecting rent on content they didn’t pay to create. Everyone else—students, independent scholars, community researchers, practitioners, the public—is positioned as either labour or audience. But never owner.

This is not new. The first journals were created to gatekeep knowledge within imperial, classed, and often explicitly racialised contexts. Many of the earliest scientific societies were directly funded by the wealth of colonial conquest. The logic has not changed. Just the branding.

So when people say, “the system is broken,” I tend to disagree. The system is working exactly as intended. We’re just not meant to survive it.

What Is the Knowledge For? Needs-Based Analysis and the Hickel Framework

Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan (the academic, not the footballer) begin their 2024 article with a deceptively simple question: How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? It’s a needs-based analysis that challenges the orthodoxy of perpetual economic expansion. Their findings are clear and urgent—if global resources were equitably redistributed and directed towards meeting human needs rather than fuelling elite consumption, we could support high levels of wellbeing at a fraction of the energy and GDP currently consumed. The problem isn’t technical. It’s political. It’s structural. It’s distributive.

And this isn’t just a lesson for economic systems. It applies—profoundly—to knowledge systems too.

We don’t need infinite journals. We don’t need twenty different articles saying the same thing, just to keep up with the demands of tenure or REF or citation metrics. We don’t need to prop up an academic prestige economy that consumes time, intellect, and public funds only to lock the outcomes behind paywalls or gatekeeping language. What we need is meaning. We need sufficiency. We need repositories of knowledge that prioritise clarity, community, and care—knowledge produced by and for the people it names, contextualises, and impacts.

Hickel and Sullivan give us a framework for understanding that more isn’t always better—that accumulation, in and of itself, is not a sign of progress. The same holds true for research. A thousand unread articles in a paywalled journal do less for humanity than a single, accessible piece that changes how a community understands itself, its history, and its options.

The crisis in publishing isn’t a crisis of output. It’s a crisis of purpose.

Enter The AutSide: Building a Countercanon from the Ground Up

Since 2022, The AutSide has quietly become one of the most extensive grassroots archives of praxis-oriented, anti-capitalist, neurodivergent, and decolonial writing published in this era. With nearly 1,400 articles and audio summaries published to date—over 300 of them focused on capitalism—and zero institutional funding, The AutSide stands as living proof that knowledge production does not require the imprimatur of journals to be rigorous, transformative, or socially vital. It requires only commitment, clarity of purpose, and an audience willing to walk alongside. The work lives not behind a paywall, but in the open—freely accessible, reader-supported, and grounded in lived experience. If readers find value in what they discover there, they’re invited to support the work. But no one is denied access. Because survival, meaning, and connection should not depend on subscriptions, prestige, or institutional affiliations.

This isn’t theory chasing tenure. It’s praxis shaped in real time, for real people, facing real crises.

The scope of The AutSide is wide: autism, capitalism, climate collapse, settler violence, language, labour, queerness, gender, and education all appear not as siloed issues but as interconnected forces shaping how we live, care, and resist. Each piece can be read as a response to one of the unmet human needs Hickel and Sullivan name—health, safety, mobility, recognition, voice. And each offers not just critique, but coherence. A reframing. A way forward.

Take “When Is Genocide Not Genocide?” for example. It examines the epistemics of AI-enabled search, contrasting which atrocities are algorithmically deemed “credible” and which are quietly erased. It reframes the Highland Clearances (aka, the genocide of the Gael), Gaza, and Donbass not as anomalies, but as recurring operations of settler logic—filtered, distorted, or erased by the systems we now use to research truth. It’s a lesson in memory politics, digital bias, and historical suppression, offered in a form accessible to students, families, and scholars alike.

In “Capitalism 101: Beyond the Myths, Into the Machinery,” the myth of capitalism as “natural” or synonymous with trade is dismantled. Drawing on lived examples and materialist history, it reframes capitalism as a system of extraction—not innovation—and unpacks how rent, surplus value, and colonialism lie at its core. It’s an essay used by mutual aid groups, secondary teachers, and early-career organisers—not to earn citations, but to build shared understanding.

“Nowhere Left to Run” asks what climate collapse and defunded mobility infrastructure mean for autistic people, especially those who cannot drive, cannot relocate, or cannot safely access public space. It doesn’t speak about disability from above—it speaks from within the precarious, daily calculations of survival. And it reminds us that climate justice must be disability justice, or it will be nothing at all.

“The Real Road to Serfdom” flips the script on Friedrich Hayek’s legacy. It shows how neoliberal apostles have twisted his fears of state tyranny into a justification for corporate feudalism. It reframes today’s economic order as the very serfdom Hayek warned against—not created by socialism, but delivered by monopoly capital and financial abstraction. This is not merely ideological critique. It’s survival insight for a generation watching their futures shrink.

“Ableism as a Colonial Condition” reframes internalised ableism not as personal failure, but as the result of epistemic violence—where institutional norms overwrite neurodivergent ways of knowing. It draws on the Power Threat Meaning Framework and decolonial theory to offer a new lens for healing and resistance.

And in “The Capitalist Dictionary: Decoding RFK Jr.’s Autism Rhetoric,” political speech is decoded not just for what it says, but for what it hides—how eugenic logics are laundered through the language of freedom, health, and parental rights. It’s not enough to call out ableism—we must learn to read it, translate it, and unmake its spell.

These are not research outputs. They are lifelines. Each piece was written in direct response to some external, material condition—a policy, a headline, a silence too loud to ignore. Not unlike this response to James’ question on LinkedIn, they emerge not from abstract inquiry, but from lived necessity. Each one is a refusal to remain gaslit. A hand extended across the algorithmic void saying: you’re not imagining it. It’s real. Here’s the language for what you’ve lived.

In other words: this is what decentralised, needs-based knowledge can do. This is what it already is doing. And it’s happening all around us, whether academia sees it or not.

Why We Don’t Need Academic Journals (But Do Need Each Other)

So why does the academic journal model still dominate, when so few genuinely benefit from it? The answer, I think, is less about infrastructure and more about culture. We’ve yet to collectively shift our trust and attention. Prestige still passes for rigour. Legitimacy is still too often defined by institutional proximity. Many continue to believe that knowledge only becomes real when filtered through peer review, formatting guidelines, and academic jargon.

But that’s a mirage. We don’t need to reform journals. We need to de-centre them. And many of us already have.

Years before The AutSide, I was doing something very similar in a completely different field—through a site called Forensic Photoshop. There, I published in-depth, citation-ready critiques of forensic imaging practices that were otherwise buried in proprietary manuals or locked behind paywalls. One post, for instance, offered a methodical challenge to how FARO Scene software was being used to measure within CCTV images—a practice increasingly introduced in court without adequate scientific validation. That post was public, detailed, and grounded in both scientific integrity and ethical concern. It asked uncomfortable but necessary questions: What counts as reliable evidence? Who decides? What happens when cross-disciplinary borrowing leads to methodological drift?

It wasn’t “peer-reviewed” as such. But it was read—by analysts, attorneys, investigators, even defence teams. Not because it had institutional backing, but because it was useful, accessible, and trustworthy.

That post—and hundreds like it—did what academic journals were meant to do, but so often don’t: inform the field, challenge bad practice, and uphold public trust. And it did so without requiring a password, a university login, or a $39.95 payment. It was one person saying something important, in public, so others could do their jobs better—and more safely.

By contrast, consider three conventional publications from my earlier career in forensic science: one, a peer-reviewed overview of manual facial photographic comparison; another, a practitioner-facing critique of the epistemic risks posed by unvalidated tools; and a third, a study validating the use of micro-learning to address statistical illiteracy in forensic contexts. Each offered a substantive critique—of subjectivity, methodological inconsistency, and the real-world dangers of applying tools without empirical grounding. These weren’t academic hypotheticals. They addressed the stakes of wrongful conviction, the misuse of institutional power, and the systemic flaws hiding beneath the veneer of scientific legitimacy.

And yet, they barely circulated. Like most published research, they were locked behind paywalls, isolated in professional silos, and written in language meant for internal consumption. Their impact was not determined by their insight, but by their inaccessibility. Important questions—about evidence, about accountability—were asked, but rarely answered where it mattered. The democratic function of knowledge collapsed under the weight of its own gatekeeping.

Hoerricks, J. (2019). Statistics for forensic analysts: A study validating the use of online micro-learning to increase statistical literacy. eForensics Magazine, IoT Forensics Issue. (link)
Hoerricks, J. (2020). Ground truth – The missing link in digital/multimedia forensic science. eForensics Magazine, Deep Dive Into Data Hiding Issue. (link).
Hoerricks, J. (2020). The subjectivity of consistency: An overview of manual facial photographic comparison in forensic science. eForensics Magazine, Face Recognition Issue. (link)

These pieces were well-researched. But they weren’t shared, discussed, or applied in ways that could change systems. That wasn’t due to a lack of merit—it was due to where, and how, they were published.

The blog posts I wrote alongside them? Those were read, cited, and acted upon. Not just because they were open access, but because they were accessible in every sense—contextual, practical, timely, and clear. They were crafted not for citation metrics, but for intervention. They lived where the problems were actually unfolding: in courtrooms, in labs, in the grey areas between disciplines. That difference in reach was no accident. It was the result of putting the work where people already were—and offering it without gatekeeping.

That same ethos drives The AutSide. I haven’t built a gated archive. I’ve spent years building a platform where deep dives—on capitalism, neurodivergence, queer life, colonialism, mobility, mutual aid—are published in the open. Whether in forensic science or critical theory, I’ve chosen transparency over prestige, rigour over ritual. And for me, as an autistic gestalt language processor, writing is not just a contribution to public knowledge—it’s how I process the world. Each piece is a recursive, digital echolalia: looping, revisiting, reworking, until it lands. These are living texts, shaped by real-time feedback, by community, by need.

They’re not reviewed solely by gatekeepers. They’re reviewed by readers, by experts, by those directly affected. They echo outward because they were formed inward—through sensory saturation, recursive thinking, and collective care. They’re cited in classrooms, in legal arguments, in WhatsApp groups and community zines. They travel further because they were never meant to be contained.

So no—we don’t need more journals. We don’t need another prestige outlet, another citation race, another warehouse of unread PDFs.

We need platforms of trust. Peer-to-peer validation. Public distribution grounded not in profit, but in solidarity. We need publishing that acts, not just archives. Writing that meets people where they are—and helps them get somewhere else: freer, safer, more informed, more connected.

In other words: we don’t need journals. We need each other.

Conclusion: “We Already Did the Work”

This isn’t a dismissal of academia. It’s a call-in—a reminder that the archive is already here, if we’re willing to recognise it. The AutSide isn’t a substitute for research, nor does it claim to be above it. Rather, it’s what research looks like when it’s freed from institutional capture. When it’s not contorted to meet grant cycles or prestige metrics. When it answers to people, not platforms. When it’s allowed to emerge in its own time, in its own language, in response to the needs that shaped it.

What we’ve built—quietly, collectively, in the margins and inboxes and self-funded Substacks—is an infrastructure of care, clarity, and refusal. A countercanon not defined by footnotes, but by frequency—by the reverberation of shared truth across bodies and screens. We write not to be discovered, but because we were never lost.

Echoing Jason Hickel’s framing: the question is no longer how much knowledge we need, but how we distribute and honour what’s already here. The work has been done. The archive exists. What’s needed now is recognition—and redistribution. Not in citation metrics or conference slots, but in action, access, and solidarity.

So to those still asking if another model is possible: it’s not only possible. It’s already happening. You’re reading it.