[GOAL] Open Access Books in Humanities Disciplines

[Sigi Jottkandt]

In case of interest to list members.

Best,
Sigi Jottkandt

OHP RELEASES SIX OPEN ACCESS BOOKS IN CRITICAL THEORY

(Ann Arbor, MI-December 19, 2011) --- Open Humanities Press (OHP) and 
MPublishing are pleased to announce the publication of six open access 
books on critical theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies. 
Each title will be freely available as full-text HTML, as well as in 
paperback editions, and are being released on a rolling publication 
schedule beginning 15 December.

In a unique collaboration, the books are being jointly released by OHP, 
an international publishing collective run by scholars, and MPublishing, 
the library-based publishing enterprise at the University of Michigan.

"We are tremendously excited with these results," says Sigi Jöttkandt, a 
co-founder of the collective and lecturer at the University of New South 
Wales in Australia. "When we first launched OHP as a high-profile open 
access journal publisher in 2008, we didn't expect to be publishing open 
access books so quickly as well."

The six books are /The Democracy of Objects/ by Levi R. Bryant; 
/Immersion Into Noise/ by Joseph Nechvatal; /Telemorphosis: Theory in 
the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1/, edited by Tom Cohen; /Impasses of 
the Post-Globa//l/: /Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 
2/,//edited by Henry Sussman;/Terror, Theory, and the Humanities/, 
edited by Jeffrey DiLeo and Uppinder Mehan; and /The Cultural Politics 
of the New American Studies/ by John Carlos Rowe.

Shana Kimball, Interim Head of MPublishing at the University of Michigan 
Library, says that the release of these books is a remarkable 
achievement for OHP and "strong proof of concept that emerging scholar 
and library led publishing models can be part of the solution to the 
problem of access."

The peer-reviewed books are part of OHP's Critical Climate Change series 
(edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook) and the New Metaphysics 
series (edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour). MPublishing created 
the structured XML for electronic and print on demand publication, as 
well as the metadata and cataloging information, and archived the books 
in the University of Michigan Library for long-term preservation.

"I've been very happy with the publishing experience," said John Carlos 
Rowe, USC Associates Chair in Humanities and Professor of English and 
American Studies and Ethnicity. "This is just what digital scholarly 
publishing needs: fully refereed work that can be compared favorably 
with the process of evaluation at any major university press."

According to Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, 
this publication event marks another milestone in the transformation of 
scholarly publishing. "It further establishes that scholars can extend 
the widely-held value of openness into the publishing realm when 
libraries give them access to the requisite expertise and mechanisms."

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Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing 
collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed 
by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that 
threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP 
journals are academically certified by OHP's independent board of 
international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, 
published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately 
available online at _http://openhumanitiespress.org_ 
<http://openhumanitiespress.org/>

MPublishing <http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpublishing> is the primary 
academic publishing division of the University of Michigan. It creates, 
promotes, distributes and preserves scholarly, educational and regional 
materials in digital and print formats. MPublishing focuses on the best 
application of technology to the world of scholarly publishing. It is 
committed to improving the copyright climate for scholarship by 
developing services for areas of publishing growth otherwise 
under-served within the University community.


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