The question as to who controls academics' knowledge is an important and increasingly urgent question. From the perspective of the good old ivory tower, it does indeed seem that corporate business has gained a high degree of control over the work of academics. The amount of money that is involved in publisher take-over deals not only shows how big the financial stakes in academic publishing are, but also gives a strong indication of the profitability of the sector. From the rather concrete question as to who controls academics' knowledge and what they should do with the impact of the global publishing industry on their academic publishing, they have ended up with a much larger issue. Whereas the question as to who controls their knowledge is, in a sense, rather parochial, the author has tried, in this paper, to broaden this question to the much wider question about the role and status of certain forms of knowledge, technology and practice in the society. That is why freeing up academic publishing by taking it out of the hands of the global publishing industry is, in itself, not really a liberation if the alternatives that emerge still are engaged in forms of publishing that contribute to the creation of asymmetries, the creation of differences between longer and shorter and between stronger and weaker networks. While the issue of academic publishing is not insignificant in all this, the much bigger question it raises, as the author has tried to show, is whether academics, scholars, social and educational scientists are involved in the creation of asymmetries, in the reduction of options for thinking and doing, or whether they are motivated by the ambition to pluralize thinking and doing, and by attempts to "deconstruct" asymmetries so as to contribute to the democratization of knowledge--an ongoing challenge which the author wishes to articulate through the "notion" of knowledge/democracy. While different scientific and academic fields may see the challenge of knowledge/democracy in their own ways, the author would contend that the challenge is particularly urgent for the field of education and educational research on the assumption that such research should in the end always take an educational stance towards its potential audience, which means, that ultimately it should have an orientation towards emancipation and the pluralization of options for judgement and action. Some steps going in that direction are offered. (Contains 6 notes.)