Open Scholarship

For my Open Scholarship project, I plan to launch a peer-reviewed overlay journal, History of Media Studies. I have been talking about the idea with the UK-based Open Library of Humanities for over a year, as the nonprofit publishing platform worked to refine its open-source Janeway journal-hosting software to accommodate overlay titles. The software is nearly ready, and I have begun to assemble an editorial board and to develop editorial policies.

An overlay journal curates, and links to, relevant articles already published or posted to the open web. (If the publication-of-record version is behind a paywall, many overlay titles will link to the post-peer review self-archived “green” version instead.) Some overlay journals, like the planned History of Media Studies, include a layer of up-or-down peer review that is, by definition, unblinded. An excellent example of an overlay journal centered on this Learning Community’s very questions is The Idealis: anyone interested in scholarly communication can follow the journal’s editor-vetted “publications” by email newsletter or RSS. The rationale is that writing on these issues is scattered across dozens of journals published into nearly as many fields. The Idealis, crucially, vets each paper—even though most are already peer reviewed—and only “publishes” articles that meet the journal’s standards. The result is a convenient and trustworthy way to keep up with the literature.

If all goes well, History of Media Studies will launch in the early months of 2018. The journal’s raison d’etre is similar: academic papers on the history of media, film and communication studies are published across a dizzying number of journals in at least half-a-dozen distinct fields, but with no regularity. I already maintain a bibliography with over 2200 published books, book chapters and journal articles on the fields’ histories, and as a result monitor over 150 journals. Together with my editorial board, the plan is to spot, then assign for up-or-down review, articles for inclusion in History of Media Studies.

I decided to approach Open Library of Humanities as publisher because I admire their library-subsidy funding model, which I hope and expect to eventually replace both the legacy subscription system, but also the problematic author-pays open access model.