small changes: open source software for publishing

This is the text of a paper I delivered at OIPA Symposium 2026 on 2026-06-18. It is a variation on my previous paper for Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2025 and has been edited from the original to incorporate some of the accompanying presentation slides into the text and to insert in-text references.

Even in open publishing where attention is usually paid to licensing concerns, proprietary software is widely used. Despite the wide availability of free and open source software capable of fulfilling every task in a publishing workflow, we remain embedded within the corporate proprietary software ecosystems which are often imposed by our neoliberal universities.

We write documents in Microsoft Word, store research data in Microsoft Excel, have meetings on Zoom, share meeting minutes in Microsoft SharePoint, typeset publications in Adobe InDesign, deposit work in Pure, and search library catalogues in Ex Libris Primo.

We continue to use these proprietary applications despite their widely publicised failings. There are memes about how Microsoft Word can’t deal with moving an image a few pixels over and how Microsoft Excel struggles with storing and formatting dates. Proprietary software like Zoom and Microsoft 365 are increasingly stuffed with LLM and generative AI features that no-one actually wants and that just get in the way.

On top of the technical failings, I’d argue that we should be led by our values and we shouldn’t work with companies complicit in genocide. The Palestinian BDS National Committee describes Microsoft as “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.” Microsoft provides technology directly to the Israeli military and is a priority target for boycott and divestment.

Plenty of good reasons to stop using proprietary software but especially if we’re working in areas of open publishing. If our goal is more ethical and inclusive publishing practices, then we need to consider the software that we use. Openness isn’t about what license we publish work under: openness is a practice, an approach to our work, the world, and each other, that requires embedding open values throughout our processes. We should use software that align with those stated values.

When I worked as part of the Copim community building infrastructures for open access book publishing, we summarised this idea in the principle of No Open Access Without Open Infrastructures.

I now work on Edinburgh Diamond and Scurl’s Open Community Hosting where I support infrastructure for open publishing initiatives across Scotland and, as much as possible, we use open source software for our community-led open publishing. Fortunately University of Edinburgh’s IT department has a good approach to developing in-house using open source infrastructures but I recognise that changing software practices is not always easy, especially embedded within institutions that impose IT restrictions on us and have a general proprietary software culture. I’ve never personally paid a subscription to Microsoft 365 but that doesn’t mean that I don’t end up using SharePoint and Teams at work. In the face of this monolithic corporate culture, changing the software that we use in universities can seem insurmountable.

But in a way, we’re well-positioned in community-led open publishing that as a relatively newer function in universities, we may have more latitude over our practices than other areas like traditional library functions which are more embedded in existing structures. So I’m suggesting making one or two small changes to your publishing workflow to try something new.

This ‘small changes’ approach to open software is inspired by Z Coltman’s paper on the Queer Liberation Library in the USA and how “small acts [...] often make a huge difference.” Coltman outlines a number of small actions that the Queer Liberation Library undertook, small functions on their website like an escape button, and how these cumulate into disproportionately impactful outcomes for their users, particularly important in light of the US neofascist assault on LGBTQ+ people. For us, divesting from companies like Microsoft or Elsevier is the long-term collective goal but as small presses we can work towards that by making small changes to what we do and encouraging our colleagues to do the same.

So: publishing starts with writing.

LibreOffice is the gold standard alternative to Microsoft Office. It is a full-featured desktop office suite that does everything Microsoft Office does but is free and open source. The word processor component is basically a straight replacement for Microsoft Word on the desktop so if you want to write and format documents with an interface that looks like Microsoft Word, this is a simple way to do so. LibreOffice also has spreadsheet software to replace Microsoft Excel, presentation software to replace Microsoft PowerPoint, and other software for the other Microsoft Office applications.

However I prefer a simpler interface for writing. I think word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs encourage a myopic focus on formatting and print rather than content of text. For both long-form and short-form writing, I recommend Zettlr, a free and open source writing application built with Zettelkasten in mind.

Zettlr offers everything you need from a writing application without the cruft of Microsoft Word or even LibreOffice: you can write text with a minimally intrusive user interface and with the minimal formatting provided through Markdown. This is great for long-form as you can concentrate on writing without worrying about fonts or paragraph breaks or text spacing or Word’s annoying invisible punctuation. But it’s also great for short-form notes as Zettlr lets you build internal links between texts to build a Zettelkasten, referencing back and forth between notes in an associative web. This works similarly to Obsidian which is another short-form writing application but Zettlr is open source.

Moving from writing to typesetting, Scribus is a free and open source typesetting application that works in the same way as Adobe InDesign but without the extortionate subscription fees. It handles layout of documents and books, fonts and character styles, and allows export of files in various formats including several flavours of PDF.

Scribus can be a little finicky. It’s a fussy little application but following a tutorial on YouTube really helped me understand the basics and I’ve been able to typeset documents and even a whole book with it and they end up looking really good when they’re exported. Most pleasingly, the Scribus developers emphasise that the software keeps you in control of your data: it doesn’t use a proprietary file format and instead saves your files in simple XML which means that it’s easy to get text out or share files between applications.

Once your publications are typeset, you need somewhere to publish them. That’s where platforms like OJS, OMP, or Janeway come in. These open source journal and book publishing platforms are already widely used for open publishing in academia so I won’t linger on them but it’s worth emphasising how robust and easy to use they are.

All this software is great for traditional publishing but maybe you or your authors want to branch out into more experimental forms of publishing. As part of Copim and Open Book Futures, we developed the Experimental Publishing Compendium which is a guide to experimental publishing and a catalogue of tools that can be used for this and also published experimental books. Every tool listed in the Compendium is open source and this therefore provides a handy list that you can browse through to find software that meets any experimental need.

To get started with experimental publishing, Manifold and Jupyter Notebook are both good tools for publishing enhanced or multimedia books. Manifold is developed by University of Minnesota Press and allows you to publish books that include a range of digital media such as video, audio, images, downloads, data visualisations, or additional PDFs. It’s a user-friendly way to develop a rich multimedia book.

Jupyter Notebook is a little more complex and geared towards STEM publishing but it allows the author to develop a computational book that features text alongside interactive code, data visualisations, etc. On one of our Copim pilot projects, we paired Jupyter Notebook with Quarto which is a publishing system that lets you automatically create static PDFs or dynamic websites from Jupyter Notebook files.

If you start small by replacing Microsoft Word with LibreOffice or Adobe InDesign with Scribus, then you can build on that. Maybe you can find other alternatives: kMeet instead of Zoom, Mattermost instead of Slack, Stoat instead of Discord. If you get used to using open source software and advocate for using open source software in open publishing, you build a case for how practical, cost-effective, and ethical it is to use open source rather than proprietary software. As these small changes build, we can move towards larger goals like divestment from corporate software providers like Microsoft, Google, Elsevier, or Ex Libris Group. We need to embed values-led open source software in our open publishing processes. Open source should be linked in our minds with open access. That’s acting on our values and allowing us to take back control of our technology from the corporations exploiting us.

references

Adema, Janneke, and Samuel A. Moore. 2021. ‘Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production’. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16 (1). https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918.

Coltman, Z, 2025. ‘Small Acts to Make Safe Space: A Case Study of the Queer Liberation Library As a Queer Space’. Information Research 30 (CoLIS): 366-74. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir30CoLIS52246.

Librarians & Archivists with Palestine. 2024. Exposing Ex Libris. Librarians & Archivists with Palestine. https://librarianswithpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ExLibris1Color.pdf.

Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC). n.d. ‘Microsoft’. BDS Movement. Accessed 2 June 2026. https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft.

Steiner, Toby, Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, Hannah Hillen, and Brendan
O’Connell. 2024. ‘A Growing Network of Open Infrastructures and Federated Services with Thoth’. Copim, May 2024. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.92d1c71e.