Open Humanities Press (OHP) and MPublishing have announced the publication of six open access books on critical theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies. The titles will be freely available as full-text HTML, as well as in paperback editions, and are being released on a rolling publication schedule that began last month.
In a unique collaboration, OHP, an international, scholar-run publishing collective, and MPublishing jointly are releasing the books.
“We are tremendously excited with these results,” says Sigi Jöttkandt, a co-founder of OHP 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-Global: 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.
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 U-M Library for long-term preservation.
Shana Kimball, interim head of MPublishing at the U-M 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.”
Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries, says 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.”
