Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 03, 2007

OA repository for cultural studies calls for contributions

Gary Hall, Culture Machine: call for contributions, a post to the Cult-Stud list, March 1, 2007.  Thanks to Underscore for the alert and for reproducing the message (otherwise accessible only to list subscribers).  Hall is the co-editor of Culture Machine (an OA journal of cultural studies) and director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive (CSeARCH).

Open access publishing has been operating successfully within the sciences for over 15 years now. Yet compared to other online movements and practices, such as creative commons, free software, open source and peer-to-peer, which have variously been regarded as providing models for new regimes of culture, new kinds of networked institutions, even for the future organisation of society, the open access movement has had relatively little impact on the humanities to date.

By making the research literature freely available to researchers, teachers, students, investigative journalists, policy makers, union organisers, NGOs, political activists, protest groups and the general public alike, on a worldwide basis, open access is seen as having the potential to break down some of the barriers between the university and the rest of society, as well as between countries in the so-called ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ worlds. It is also held as helping to overcome the ‘Westernization’ of the research literature through the creation of a far more decentralised and distributed research community. So why, given the often radical nature of the content of their work, have those in the humanities, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, been so reluctant to challenge what John Willinsky in The Access Principle refers to as the ‘complacent and comfortable habits of scholarly publishing’? Why have those in the sciences apparently proved the more institutionally, socially and politically progressive in this respect?

In an attempt to go at least some way toward addressing this situation, we are continuing to seek contributions to the CSeARCH open access archive for research and publications in cultural studies and related fields: communication and media studies, continental philosophy, literary, critical and cultural theory, new media, visual culture, psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory and so on....

Update. CSeARCH seems to accept articles for deposit, i.e. for local hosting. But Klaus Graf reports that he has been unable to find any locally-hosted articles, just links to externally hosted articles.