[Air-L] OHP Releases Six Open Access Books in Critical Theory

[Gary Hall]

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 a paperback edition. The titles are being 
released on a rolling publication schedule beginning 15 December at:

http://openhumanitiespress.org

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-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;
* 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 Associate Professor of the Humanities and former Chair of the 
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of 
Southern California. “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.”

Contact: Sigi Jöttkandt: sigij at openhumanitiespress.org
Open Humanities Press

Shana Kimball: kimballs at umich.edu
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

###

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

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


-- 
Gary Hall
Research Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Co-editor of Culture Machine
http://www.culturemachine.net
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Website http://www.garyhall.info

Latest:
Living Books About Life
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org