The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the life-draining embrace of the publishing oligopolists. But the APC—the fee many publishers charge authors to publish—is a homegrown pro…[Read more]

The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the life-draining embrace of the publishing oligopolists. But the APC—the fee many publishers charge authors to publish—is a homegrown pro…[Read more]

Open access publishing (OA) not only removes price and permission restrictions to academic research, but also represents an opportunity to reassess what publishing means to the humanities. OA is increasingly on the agenda for humanities researchers in the UK, having been mandated in various forms by universities and governmental funders strongly…[Read more]

Open access publishing (OA) not only removes price and permission restrictions to academic research, but also represents an opportunity to reassess what publishing means to the humanities. OA is increasingly on the agenda for humanities researchers in the UK, having been mandated in various forms by universities and governmental funders strongly…[Read more]

The movement for open access publishing is often said to have its roots in the scientific disciplines, having been popularised by scientific publishers and formalised through a range of top-down policy interventions. But there is an often-neglected pre-history of open access that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late ‘80s and e…[Read more]

Media research is a vexing enterprise. Trapped in the borderlands between social science and the humanities, the study of media and communication bears the liabilities of both. We have to contend with all the challenges that sociologists and literary scholars face: the subjective baggage of the analyst, her struggle to interpret unstable meanings,…[Read more]

The erroneous belief that a new medium will completely replace a previous one is nowhere more evident than in discussions surrounding the emergence of electronic text. Having pre- viously fended off the challenges of the phonograph, motion picture, radio, and television, in the early 1990s the book was seen as finally having met its match in the…[Read more]

The erroneous belief that a new medium will completely replace a previous one is nowhere more evident than in discussions surrounding the emergence of electronic text. Having pre- viously fended off the challenges of the phonograph, motion picture, radio, and television, in the early 1990s the book was seen as finally having met its match in the…[Read more]

In its postwar institutional infancy, American mass communication research badly needed a history. Communication study in the United States, jerry-rigged from journalism schools and speech departments in the years following World War II, has from the beginning suffered from a legitimacy deficit. This paper traces Wilbur Schramm’s self-conscious a…[Read more]

Academia.edu has been called “Facebook for academics,” and the analogy is fitting: Academia.edu mimics core social-media conventions, down to follower counts, curated profiles with pics, and a scrollable “News Feed” bulletin of followers’ uploads. But its reliance on user-facing metrics exceeds anything you’ll find on mainstream social media. It…[Read more]

Academia.edu has been called “Facebook for academics,” and the analogy is fitting: Academia.edu mimics core social-media conventions, down to follower counts, curated profiles with pics, and a scrollable “News Feed” bulletin of followers’ uploads. But its reliance on user-facing metrics exceeds anything you’ll find on mainstream social media. It…[Read more]