The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic publication
The 2004 article chronicles ICAAP as a not-for-profit initiative devoted to the inexpensive web-based publication of scholarly journals, founded by Michael Sosteric at Athabasca University as a direct response to the “serials crisis” wrought by predatory commercial publishers. Positioned as a pragmatic “middle way” between radical preprint archives and the conservative commercial mainstream, ICAAP sought to return low-circulation, peer-reviewed journal production to scholar-led hands through open-source software, SGML-based markup (IXML), automated editorial workflows, and centralized infrastructure services offered free to member journals. However, the initiative remained limited by lack of institutional support and its embeddedness in the very system it intended to replace: it retained the traditional journal format and conventional peer-review prestige economies. Consequently, ICAAP could not fully escape the gravitational pull of the commercial enclosure apparatus it diagnosed, serving ultimately as an early, primitive attempt to transform scholarly communication that proved structurally vulnerable to the same market inertia, bureaucratic gatekeeping, and neoliberal funding logics it was designed to overcome.