Welcome to the our Post-Publishing Winter Newsletter! Please find underneath a selection of recent updates from Post-Publishing researchers. You can sign up to receive our newsletter here (scroll to the bottom).
The Post-Publishing research strand and the Centre for Postdigital Cultures are thrilled to announce a fully-funded PhD studentship exploring alternative publishing practices and formats, and their potential to foster more supportive, diverse, and equitable publishing cultures. Learn more and apply here.
Together with the Open Book Futures Experimental Publishing Group we are running a seminar series (‘Experimental Book Publishing in Practice’) for those interested in experimental scholarly book publishing. Throughout 2024 and 2025 these seminars will bring together authors and publishers with software and tool providers. Our second seminar will be Thursday 16th January 2025 at 17:00 CET/16:00 GMT/11:00 EST bringing together Remi Kalir (Duke University), Sonja Visser (Hypothes.is), & Janneke Adema (Open Humanities Press) to discuss the annotation software Hypothes.is. More information about the seminar series here and please register here.
We are also happy to formally launch the Post-Publishing Lab. The Lab offers support and consultancy for individuals, groups, and organisations interested in the potentials and possibilities of experimental publishing in the arts and humanities. Please get in touch if you are interested in exploring alternative academic publishing futures together with us!
Save the date for the Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism conference on 10 and 11 April 2025 online and at the Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library. How can social justice activism be promoted or unfolded through academic publishing? What is the value of collectivising through publishing projects? What are the dynamics, challenges, and opportunities that arise when individuals and communities from diverse backgrounds come together to work on shared radical publishing projects?
Also stay tuned for the inaugural iteration of the Post-Publishing Plenum hosted by the Post-Publishing research strand. The Plenum is an open triannual gathering of scholars and practitioners in critical and experimental publishing that are interested in informal discussion and debate, knowledge-sharing, and mutual support. The Forum – offered in the spirit of friendly, open-ended, and non-instrumental exchange – will feature and discuss a changing selection of topics and texts of interest to the community.
Simon Bowie presented a paper at the UKSG November Conference 2024 on the theme of “Cybersecurity and Censorship”. Simon’s paper was called ‘Proprietary software has failed: a community-driven open source security proposal’ and discussed university libraries’ reliance on unreliable proprietary software in the wake of a wave of cyberattacks before proposing a community-led and library-owned alternative infrastructure model using open source software. The full text of Simon’s paper is available at https://opensauce.simonxix.com/uksgnov2024/.
Eva Weinmayr delivered her inaugural lecture ‘Noun to Verb: Propositions for transformative intersectional publishing’ at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Basel Academy of Art and Design on December 10, 2024. In her talk Eva proposed to approach publishing as a scene of relations and explored the agency of editorial processes to address power relations and accessibility in publishing. Eva also delivered the public lecture Practices of Transformative Publishing, at ZHdK Zürich, November 27, 2024, as part of the lecture series “Recht auf Wir – Wie geht das?” which addresses in- and exclusion, power relations and circumstances of privilege as well as responsibilities that come with it.
Rebekka Kiesewetter was invited to talk at ‘New Modes of Publishing for the Future of Democracy’, the15-year Jubilee Symposium of Culture Unbound journal, at Linköping University in Norköping (Sweden). In her talk ‘Editing as Enabling’she took her guest editorship of the ‘Publishing after Progress’ special issue of Culture Machine journal as a starting point for exploring editing as a praxis that combines an interventionist engagement with current metrics- and productivity-driven institutional publishing frameworks and related normative ideas on scholarly work with addressing democratic concerns about knowledge equity and diversity in academia.
Following the publication of issue 4.1 of the other side of hope, a literary magazine that Alexandros Plasatis publishes, he organised launches and events for the magazine as part of the London Migration Film Festival, and the Being Human Festival, and at Northampton and Leeds Universities, and Kelvin Hall, National Library of Scotland, Glasgow.
Alongside her research this term, Clare Harvey has led writing workshops in local libraries and given seminars to MA students at the University of Nottingham and Coventry University.
Judith Fathallah helped to plan, attended and presented at Open Monograph Publishing: Towards Sustainable Open Access Book Publishing in the Global South Context, a workshop on the 9th and 10th December 2024 at the University of Cape Town, part of the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. The full programme is available here. Judith presented ‘The Open Book Collective Development Fund’ and ‘OA Book Stakeholders in the African Context: An Inquiry and Invitation’ (all slides at link). In the New Year she will be convening a working group to take forward the work of better understanding the landscape of OA Books in Africa with colleagues at DOAB & OAPEN, the Chinhoyi University of Technology (Zimbabwe) and the Zambia Library Consortium. Relatedly, the Open Book Collective has announced the first recipients of its Collective Development Fund, the first of which will foster academic self-reliance through increasing capacity for OA publishing in Nigeria, the second of which will develop OA publishing at the Chinhoyi University of Technology, and the third of which will centre and support grassroots publishing initiatives in the open book publishing system.
Janneke Adema delivered the paper ‘Promoting Interactions and Engagement with Scholarly Research: Speculations on the Role of the Librarian in Advancing Experimental Publishing’, at the DKIS Conference onAdvancing Social Justice Through Curriculum Realignment: Centering Scholarly Communication in LIS Curricula at the University of Cape Town on 8-9 December 2024. Janneke also presented at the above pre-conference workshop (organised by COPIM), that Judith organised at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. Centering social justice in scholarly communication to advance research as a public good, at the University of Cape Town, 10-14 December 2024.