HASTAC Scholars Julie Levin Russo and Chris Hanson have launched our
next discussion forum on "Academic Publishing in the Digital Age."
They will be joined by staff from the online journals Vectors and Transformative Works and Culture, and we hope you will come join the discussion as well!

Academic
Publishing in the Digital Age

Forum open at www.hastac.org

Following from
October's
discussion of the importance of Fair Use, this forum will offer an
opportunity
to extend the dialogue about new challenges and opportunities in
academic
publishing today. As established print journals tend toward expensive
and
restricted subscriptions in response to current technological and
financial
conditions, a counter-movement is growing in support of online access
to
scholarship as a public good, led by open electronic journals and
databases.
Are traditional journals a relic of a pre-internet era, or does their
publication model still have value in academia? How can either system
be
economically viable? Given that strict liability copyright standards
are a
hurdle for print journals, do electronic journals provide a necessary
haven for
the citation and transformation of proprietary artifacts and work? In a
context
where everyone can have a blog or home page, what do students and
scholars need
to know about the benefits and risks of self-publishing? And perhaps
most
importantly, what new possibilities for intellectual and creative work
are
capacitated by the web as a platform?

The
goal of this forum is to
explore the shifting definition of academic publishing in the digital
age, as
well as to consider the intellectual, creative and technical challenges
which
digital platforms pose for scholarly publication. The
conversation will be co-hosted by HASTAC
Scholars Chris Hanson of USC, who has worked for the online journal Vectors, and Julie Levin Russo of Brown,
who works for the online journal Transformative
Works and Cultures. They will be joined by other members of these
publications' editorial and creative teams, including Tara McPherson,
Steve
Anderson and Erik Loyer. Vectors is an international
electronic journal that brings together visionary scholars with
cutting-edge
designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the
dynamic
relationship of form to content in academic research, publishing works
realized
in multimedia that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional
scholarship. Transformative Works and
Cultures is an Open
Access international electronic journal on popular media and fan
communities published by the Organization for Transformative Works, and
invites
authors to embrace the technical possibilities of the web and test the
limits
of academic writing. Both publications are copyrighted under Creative
Commons
licenses.

Chris
Hanson is a Ph.D.
candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California
School
of Cinematic Arts. His dissertation
focuses on replay and repetition in interactive media, television and
avant-garde/experimental film and is tentatively entitled ?One More
Time:
Instances, Applications and Implications of the Replay.? At USC, he has worked on research projects at
the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and in serious game design for
the EA
Game Innovation Lab and the Institute for Creative Technologies.

Julie
Levin Russo is a Ph.D.
candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown Universitycompleting a
dissertation
entitled "Indiscrete Media: Television/Internet Convergence and
Economies
of Online Lesbian Fan Communities." In addition to various
publications,
presentations and the aforementioned editorial work, her recent
projects have
included co-editing a special Battlestar
Galactica issue of the online journal FlowTV
and guest blogging in Henry Jenkins's "Gender and Fan Culture"
series. Look for her monthly videoblogs on topics of interest to the
HASTAC
community.