So much of the contemporary discourse around open scholarly infrastructures still seems dependent on an ethic of "if you build it they will come," even though we know from the history of print cultures that authority, trust, and value are hard-won qualities that are underpinned by dynamic political, social, cultural, and economic work. This contribution examines the ways we think about scale, scarcity, and prestige in both online and print contexts. In the last decade, Scholarly Commons have emerged as a particular intervention in the struggle for and against platform dominance in contemporary scholarly communications. To what extent do these interventions work counter to print-capitalist models, and how can then effectively facilitate open social scholarship?

This is a recording of a featured talk by John Maxwell and Beatrice Glickman; the session was chaired by Alyssa Arbuckle. The talk was presented virtually during the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, as part of the Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences event series, on Thursday, June 9, 2022. More information can be found here: https://inke.ca/launching-digital-commons-3. An earlier version of the talk is available here, in draft form: https://hsscommons.ca/publications/350/1.