Metatorial: Articulating the Essential Practices of Open Access Publishing in an Age of AI Knowledge Systems

Open Access (OA) publishing has expanded access to scholarly research through a growing ecosystem of collective funding models, institutional partnerships, and community-supported publishing initiatives. At the same time, the increasing complexity of OA funding environments, combined with the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-mediated knowledge systems, has exposed a largely overlooked challenge: understanding not only what scholarly content becomes openly available, but also how that content is selected, funded, organized, discovered, preserved, and sustained over time.

This paper introduces metatorial, a framework developed by Mirela Roncevic to describe and examine a set of essential yet often fragmented or overlooked practices within contemporary OA publishing. Positioned between editorial practice and institutional stewardship, metatorial focuses on the evaluative, organizational, communicative, and continuity-related activities meant to shape both the funding of OA content and its long-term visibility across scholarly and knowledge environments.

The paper introduces the concepts of metatorial imprint and metatorial footprint to distinguish between pre-funding and post-publication responsibilities within the OA ecosystem. It further proposes metatorial as an inventory process through which institutions, libraries, publishers, funders, intermediaries, and scholarly communities can examine seven interconnected dimensions of OA publishing: content, participation, representation, funding, discovery, visibility, and continuity.

Rather than offering a checklist or compliance framework, metatorial provides a way of understanding how collective publishing decisions shape the scholarly environments they help create. At a time when openly available research increasingly informs both scholarship and AI systems, the paper argues that greater attention to these interconnected dimensions and activities can strengthen the coherence, relevance, discoverability, and long-term value of the research being collectively funded and supported.