The Architecture of Access: Building for What Publishing Should Have Always Been

There is a central figure in academic publishing who receives almost no critical attention: the editor who never sends a paper submission to review.

The public debate about scholarly publishing orbits fees. Article Processing Charges, subscription costs, the economics of open access. Gold, Green, Diamond, the alphabet of reform. These distinctions matter: they determine who can afford to read research, and who can afford to publish it. But in focusing on payment, the discourse leaves untouched a concentration of epistemic power that operates upstream of peer review, upstream of any quality assessment, and almost entirely outside public scrutiny.

The desk rejection is the instrument of this power. Before any reviewer reads your argument, before any methodological scrutiny takes place, an editor decides whether your question is worth asking. Whether your framework is recognisable. Whether you belong, in some unspoken sense, to the conversation. This decision is made quickly, often without stated criteria, and without accountability. It is the most consequential moment in the life of a piece of scholarship, and the least discussed.

We talk about reviewers as the guardians of scholarly rigour. And they are, or should be. The reviewer's job is to assess the quality of an argument on its terms: its evidence, its logic, its contribution. That is the epistemic function. But the editor decides whether the argument ever reaches that function at all. The reviewer judges. The editor selects. And selection, unlike judgment, is shaped by taste, by network, by institutional familiarity, by what a journal's prestige depends on reproducing.

This is not a neutral process. It is a political one, and it compounds across generations.

Miranda Fricker named what this produces: testimonial injustice, when a speaker's credibility is discounted because of who they are; hermeneutical injustice, when the dominant frameworks lack the concepts to recognise an experience as knowledge at all. Academic publishing does not just reflect these injustices. It manufactures them, actively, at the desk, before the inquiry begins. 

Removing the financial barrier while leaving this structure intact changes who can afford to publish without changing who gets to be heard. Diamond Open Access, no fees to read and no fees to publish, is necessary. It is not sufficient.

We are aware of the distance between diagnosing a structural problem and claiming to have solved it. Vector Press does not resolve the editorial power problem; no single publisher could. What we can do is build differently, and be explicit about the choices that entails.

"Access by Design" is the principle we work from. It means that accessibility is not an afterthought retrofitted once the real architecture is in place. It is the architecture. One concrete example: we do not require institutional affiliation or prior publication history to publish with us. That is not a waiver. It is a deliberate editorial position that the absence of a university address tells us nothing about the quality or importance of an argument. We do not eliminate the editor's desk, but we strip it of its opacity: our criteria for selection are public, strictly bounded, and explicitly blind to pedigree. Every journal that filters on institutional grounds makes the opposite choice, whether they admit it or not. We state ours.

The same principle runs through our licensing (CC BY-SA 4.0 with authors retaining full copyright), our submission process, our technical infrastructure, and our editorial choices about whose work we actively seek out. These are not independent features. They are the same decision made at different points in the same structure.

C/V launches as a journal of commentary, journalism, and critical writing on epistemic justice, on the politics of knowledge, and on what open access actually demands when taken seriously. The arguments we most need are often the ones the existing filtration systems are least equipped to recognise. Building a journal that structurally removes those filters is not a generous gesture toward the margins. It is a correction to the centre.

The editor’s desk is where most knowledge gets stopped. We intend to build around it.