Knowledge Commons Annual Report

2025 Director’s Statement

2025 has been a year of big wins and big losses for Knowledge Commons, and while it’s been challenging at times to keep our bearings, we have been guided by what we think of (being in the northern hemisphere) as our North Star: the transformation of the academy through the replacement of closed, corporate, extractive models of scholarly communication with open, collaborative, community-governed networks and systems.

We are enormously proud of what we’ve accomplished, and yet that North Star reminds us of the crucial work ahead to ensure that the Commons becomes a genuinely self-governing network, sustaining and being sustained by a coalition of researchers, instructors, librarians, artists, and other knowledge workers and their institutions and organizations.

This implies three interconnected goals:

1. Ensure that the Commons platform provides and supports the functionality that this coalition needs to work in open, collaborative, connected ways.
2. Build a sense of belonging for members of the Commons coalition that encourages advocacy and investment of time and resources.
3. Operate with transparency so members can be confident that investments are well-used and development aligns with technical and ethical expectations.

Articulating these goals leads us to understand the Commons as a form of mutual aid for knowledge, countering what Dan McQuillan calls the “carelessness” of Big Tech. Mutual aid counteracts social separation with “relations of mutual interdependence,” in which “we act for each other because we recognize, at some level, that we are not absolutely divided and separate, that we co-constitute each other in some important way” (McQuillan, Resisting AI 120).

That mutuality is the key to the future of the Commons. We want to be a resource that you can confidently rely upon — and for that to be true we need to rely on you. You’ll be hearing more from us about our coalition-building work in the weeks ahead. For now, here’s to the year we’ve survived together – and to the one ahead, in which I hope we can thrive together.

~ Kathleen

2025 by the Numbers