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.