At UC Press, open access—the free, immediate, unrestricted, online access to peer-reviewed research and scholarly work—is central to our mission. In celebration of 2018 International Open Access Week (October 22-28), we are highlighting several open access publishing programs and initiatives at UC Press. You can follow our full OA Week 2018 blog series here.
In this post, Dan Morgan, the publisher behind UC Press’s open-access journals Collabra: Psychology and Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene updates us on two new OA ventures from UC Press: Civic Sociology and Media and Environment.
This OA week, in addition to celebrating milestones, author interviews, and diving deeper into Editoria, we also wanted to simply announce that we are launching two further Gold OA journals here at UC Press! They will be joining the already established Collabra: Psychology and Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, which are both now established and well-respected journals in their respective fields. Please read about them both, below, and consider supporting them or informing relevant colleagues and faculty.
Civic Sociology
Civic Sociology, which was first announced in August at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, is already open for submissions. Led by Editor-in-Chief Eric Lybeck of the University of Manchester, UK, the journal is a new effort to make sociological research more relevant and effective within professional, policy, and public forms of engagement, by proposing solutions to, rather than just explaining, criticising or describing social problems. As Dr. Lybeck puts it himself in a post from earlier this year “It’s an effort to put our sociological insights into action—to start solving problems, particularly starting at the local and regional level.”
Also, from the journal’s extended Aims and Scope: “This amounts to a return to earlier versions of sociological practices, some of which were explicitly called ‘civic sociology’. This includes the work of Patrick Geddes and the Branfords within the Edinburgh civics school, the settlement house movement pioneered by Jane Addams and the Chicago School, and the Atlanta sociological laboratory developed by W.E.B. DuBois. Their civic work provides models for present and future efforts to better integrate sociological knowledge in society.”
The journal will feature a low APC of $600 as its initial sustainability model. I say initial because, as we are all aware, there are myriad potential business models to support OA, and UC Press is involved in exploring several of these, for example via projects such as Move-it-Forward and last week’s Choosing Pathways to OA. In any case, Civic Sociology joins a distinguished list of OA journals in sociology proving that it can be done in this field (e.g. Socius, Frontiers in Sociology, and Sociological Science, to name just three).
Media+Environment
Media+Environment (officially known as Media and Environment) will launch imminently, and is a journal of interdisciplinary ecomedia research. It is led by Co-Editors-in-Chief Alenda Chang and Janet Walker, both of University of California, Santa Barbara, and Adrian Ivakhiv of the University of Vermont.
From the forthcoming aims and scope: “Film and media studies conventionally encompass the analysis of film, television, and a growing panoply of digital media platforms, practices, and technologies. However, scholars in the field are also increasingly and deeply concerned with media’s embeddedness in environmental contexts and environments themselves as media, capable of signaling and transforming both the human and the elemental. Accordingly expansive and inclusive in its orientation, Media+Environment supports scholarship about media texts and contexts: histories, technologies, networks, infrastructures, data, social media, artistic and creative works, and regulatory pipelines and policies.” The journal will have no author-facing APCs—the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara is the journal’s main sponsor along with support from UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, the University of Vermont, and Monash University, Australia. The journal will continue to seek additional funding and to build an international consortium of university and institutional partners supportive of the journal’s goals in both words and funding support. If you are at an institution which would like to support the journal, however small the contribution, please reach out to Carsey-Wolf Center Associate Director Emily Zinn (ezinn[at]carseywolf.ucsb.edu). Media+Environment is a nonprofit journal intended as a public, scholarly good—your support, whatever its size, will always make a tremendous difference.
