Future Formats, Distillation or Dilation?

An interesting conversation this morning with one of my IAS colleagues about the future of academic publishing. As an ethnographer of scholarly communications, it is always most enlightening to hear about the ontological drivers underlying a fellow researcher’s publication praxis. It was particularly edifying to witness, again, a dedication to the pursuit of human knowledge for the betterment of society. Certainly a driver such as this, in an age of neoliberal marketization and corporatisation of the Academy, might be constructed as diminishing within the research community. Yet, I say again, because during my own research, this remains an oft expressed motivational imperative behind many academics’ endeavours.

That aside, one topic we chatted about for a while, concerned the future formats of research publication. Running Exchanges, as I do, we’ve followed to date very much a traditional, if entirely diamond (or radical, if you prefer) open access publication model. We have word limits, we rely largely on the printed word and we’ve not routinely incorporated research artefacts or data within our outputs. Nevertheless, for many researchers, especially in the arts and humanities, such prosaic distillations of their work and discoveries might at best be considered considerably reductionist, or at worst represent a barrier between communicating their meaning to society-at-large.

Is there an alternative? Are there forms of research outputs which could be captured, exposed to appropriate quality assurance and review processes, and thence shared with the world? Almost certainly, although technically and indeed procedural, how a title such as ours might go about achieving represents a considerable challenge I’ll be grappling with and exploring over the coming months in this post. Certainly, while Exchanges does contain some wonderfully written articles across a spectrum of inter-disciplinarily, my hope for the future is that it can achieve some measure of evolutionary, and even experimental, work in sharing new forms of media and research outputs.

For now, these are thoughts in my head and many discussions lie ahead of me with other scholars and practitioners within the scholarly publication field. Yet, I remain heartened in my efforts that despite intrinsically capital-enmeshed metric drivers of publishing praxis, like REF2021, scholars continue to embrace an ideological embrace of the societal value of their research. One more reason, I would argue, for the continued reclamation of publishing agency by scholar-led entities such as Exchanges.

Gareth Johnson : 02 May 2018 10:30 |  Tags: Experimental Formats Ontology Praxis Publication |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Welcome to the Exchanges Blog

As the title says, welcome to the Exchanges: The Warwick Research Journal blog. My name's Gaz J Johnson, and I'm the fairly freshly appointed Senior Editor of this interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal, based in the Institute of Advanced Study.

Exchanges has been around for over 5 years now, and has developed into a valued publishing location for early career researchers (ECR) across the university and affiliated institutions, who are looking for to publish interdisciplinary scholarly material. Over the coming months and years, part of my Senior Editor remit is to expand the journal’s focus beyond Warwick, especially with those international organisations with whom we have exciting scholarly links. Hence, I’ll be using talking about developments around the title over the coming months.

As my own background as a researcher is as a political-economist and social theorist in the field of emerging publishing modes, especially open access, I’ll also be using this blog to muse about developments here as well. Hopefully, this might even engender a bit of conversation and insight from other scholars in this field too.

Alongside this, I’ll be highlighting and exploring selected authors and articles from past and future issues. I’m aiming to include a few post-publication interviews with authors as well, exploring how their work’s advanced since publication and what additional resonances, insights or impacts it’s created.

I’ll also be using the blog to highlight various announcements, for example calls for papers and (very shortly) calls for applications to join the Editorial Team. Exchanges has a team of Editors drawn from the ECR community, whose work comprises an essential and much valued contribution to the title. Quite literally, without them, the journal wouldn’t exist. We all work in collaboration with the University Library too, who provide insight and technical infrastructure for the title. As a former academic librarian myself, I’m especially excited to be working with the library’s scholarly publications team in this endeavour.

Finally, for this post at least, I’ll highlight where you can find out more about Exchanges.

• IAS Exchanges Journal –an overview of the title
• Exchanges: The Warwick Research Journal – journal home page, with information for authors and previous issues
• @ExchangesIAS – our (also) newly minted twitter channel, for brief highlights and insights.
• Contacts – how to get in touch with myself and the team.

Gareth Johnson : 24 Apr 2018 09:45 |  Tags: Announcements Content Editorial News Submission Team |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem