Burning Down the House” challenges the view that scholar-led open-access publishing has helped push open access in a more commercial direction, and that nonprofit university presses offer a better, more balanced path for fair access to knowledge. 

In Joy's talk, she questions the recent idea of “academy-owned” publishing and argues that today’s market-driven university system is not the best place to guarantee equitable access or academic freedom. 

While university presses have published important work, they also operate within systems that value oversight, metrics, and conformity. These pressures shape hiring, tenure, and promotion, and can limit creativity and independent thinking — even as presses claim to “advance thought.” 

By framing publishing as “academy-owned,” universities risk reinforcing the idea that knowledge belongs within established institutions. Joy’s talk suggests that scholar-led presses may currently offer more space for experimental, unconventional, and independent scholarship. 

Dr. Eileen Joy is a literary and cultural theorist, medievalist, and the founder and Director of punctum books, a fully independent open access publisher “devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing.” With punctum books, Dr. Joy pioneered a model of Open Access publishing that partners with institutional libraries that never charges author fees, is built on community-owned infrastructures, and understands the specific needs of humanities researchers when it comes to publishing and tenure. You can read punctum’s vision statement here.