Mehmet Akif Çakmak

Mehmet Akif Çakmak (b. 1980, Erzurum) is a researcher and author working on Turkish political history, the sociology of institutions and cultural memory, whose books range from the history of parliaments and the tradition of the state to the histories of law, economics, trade and technology, and from the histories of religion, Sufism and philosophy to Turkish literature.

His corpus of twenty-one works, the product of twenty-one years of research and writing, is organised around a single research problem: how does a community reach a collective decision? He examines the morphology of decision-making through an interdisciplinary method.

The works fall into thematic groups. The First Assembly, The Second Assembly and The Last Ottoman Parliament analyse the institutional thresholds of Turkish parliamentary history, while TOY traces the historical roots of collective reason in the kurultai tradition. The unseen dynamics of political process are examined in History of the Secret Organisations of the Turkic States and History of Secret Societies; the relation between power and the sacred in The Clergy and History of Faith and Myth; the moral ground of thought in History of Philosophy and Ideas. The institutionalisation of force, exchange and value is traced through History of Law and Justice, History of Money and Economics, History of Trade and History of Technology, and the present end of that same line is set out in Quantum Algorithmic Finance, on artificial intelligence and the architecture of markets. His studies of Sufism and literary memory continue in Hallâj, The Assembly of the Forty, KAF, Yunus Emre and Yunus Emre: Divan and Commentary; his work on civic and local memory is completed by History of Erzurum.

Preceded by nine years of sustained work in the literature and the archives, the first volume appeared in 2017; the corpus now runs to 10,483 pages. Rejecting the commodification of knowledge, Çakmak has adopted the principles of Open Science and released every work free, in full text and open access. This position — which refuses to treat research and scholarly production as a route to a title or a commercial income — places the right of universal access to knowledge at its centre. The author holds that even where the works are offered for a price on particular platforms, the income arising should not accrue to him but be donated to work that advances equality of opportunity in education.

Çakmak has implemented the technical standards of scholarly publishing without depending on the infrastructure of the large publishers, within a digital library ecosystem he built himself.

All twenty-six works published on that infrastructure are registered with DOIs in the DataCite database. The digital archive supports the OAI-PMH, MARCXML and ONIX protocols, so that it is directly harvestable by the catalogue systems of national and international university libraries. To standardise citation, every book page carries structured references in APA, MLA, Chicago and İSNAD formats together with BibTeX and RIS data. The structural integrity and archival permanence of the PDF and EPUB texts are secured by SHA-256 cryptographic digests.