Online Publishing, Technical Representation, and the Politics of Code: The Case of CJC Online

<jats:p> The Canadian Journal of Communication ( CJC) began to experiment with online technologies in 1994, in part as a response to the increasing commodification of scholarship by commercial academic publishers. This article reviews and reflects on the CJC’s online publishing efforts over the past decade and suggests that online publishing technology is a site of struggle that is situated by and situates academics, publishers, and readers along interdependent axes of agency, citizenship, and commodification. Today, the CJC uses and contributes to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing technology developed by the Public Knowledge Project. We argue that academic-initiated undertakings such as OJS and the Canada-wide Synergies project present academics with strategic opportunities to define and control online scholarly publishing. </jats:p>