Open access monographs

[Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

In case of interest to the list. Please feel free to disseminate widely,

Best wishes and thanks,
Sigi
-----------------------------------
For Immediate Release, October 23, 2008
Contact: Sigi Jöttkandt: +32 (0)2 792 7346
Open Humanities Press
sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS: MORE JOURNALS PARTICIPATING – Joining the 
pioneering open access publisher this month are journals specializing in 
postcolonial literary studies, visual narrative and contemporary media 
culture.

The major new humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press 
(OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), has expanded its offerings in 
peer-reviewed scholarly publishing on the Web. Postcolonial Text, Image 
[&] Narrative, and Fast Capitalism have been approved by OHP’s editorial 
board and are joining the international open access humanities 
publishing collective. The new additions represent OHP’s continued 
success at attracting high-quality publications to its list of 
academically-certified online journals. Like all the journals affiliated 
with OHP, the full text of each of the new additions is immediately 
available in open access form at no cost to the readers or authors.

John Willinsky, Professor of Education at Stanford University and 
Director of the Public Knowledge Project that designed and built the 
open source journal publishing software used by many of the OHP journals 
said, “I am extremely pleased that Open Humanities Press has recognized 
Postcolonial Text as a leading journal for its stable of prestigious 
open access publications.” A founding co-editor of Postcolonial Text and 
advisory board member of OHP, Willinsky added that, “in its fourth year 
of publication, Postcolonial Text continues to break new ground in 
critical analysis and creative writing on a born digital, born open 
access basis. I'm delighted to see the two initiatives support each 
other in their shared aim of moving this world forward.” Postcolonial 
Text was founded in 2004 by John Willinsky and Ranjini Mendis (Kwantlen 
Polytechnic University, Canada); in 2008 Heike Härting (University of 
Montreal, Canada) was appointed the journal’s Editor-in-Chief.

“In an era of rampant privatization of ‘intellectual property,’ open 
access publishing aims to revive the idea of the intellectual commons,” 
explained Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political 
and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in New York, 
who serves on the editorial board of Fast Capitalism, alongside Fredric 
Jameson (Duke University), Mark Poster (UC Irvine), Edward Soja (UCLA), 
Todd Gitlin (Columbia University), and others. “How fitting, then, that 
Fast Capitalism should join Open Humanities Press.” Fast Capitalism was 
founded in 2005 by Ben Agger (University of Texas at Arlington) and Tim 
Luke (Viriginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). It 
describes itself as “an academic journal with political intent.”

To become affiliated with OHP, journals undergo a rigorous assessment by 
the press’s editorial oversight group. Once a journal has been approved 
by the board, OHP works with editors to ensure the new additions meet a 
number of open technical standards. Jan Baetens, a founding co-editor of 
Image [&] Narrative explained, “Open Humanities Press represents the new 
paradigm of scholarly publishing our own journal has been defending 
since 2000. Becoming part of OHP gives us access to a collective 
technical knowledge that will help us bring our journal in line with the 
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), 
making our nearly ten years’ worth of publication more easily indexed by 
libraries and search engines such as Google.” Edited by Jan Baetens (KU 
Leuven) Anneleen Masschelein (KU Leuven) and Hilde Van Gelder (KU 
Leuven), Image [&] Narrative publishes writings on visual narratology in 
French and English.

OHP offers its new additions permanent archiving through a LOCKSS 
project based at Carnegie Mellon University. The collective also assists 
its partner journals who wish to migrate to Public Knowledge Project’s 
Open Journal Systems, which features an electronic submission system 
with author tracking capabilities, peer review management, and 
publication of articles in both HTML and PDF formats.

OHP already publishes 7 journals in critical and cultural theory that 
are run by their own independent editorial boards and external 
peer-reviewers. The collective expects to add more journals in critical 
and cultural theory over the coming months. “We are seeing an increasing 
number of venues where humanities scholars can publish in open access 
format without risk to traditional academic standards” said Sigi 
Jöttkandt, a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, The Netherlands and 
co-founder (with Gary Hall, David Ottina and Paul Ashton) of OHP. She 
added, “Open access sustains a diversity of critical voices that could 
otherwise easily be lost in today’s increasingly fragile economic climate.”

###

Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing 
collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed 
by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that 
threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP 
journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of 
international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, 
published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately 
available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org.

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