Journal Committee Announced

[femmequixotic]

We'd like to announce our new Journal Committee, whose function is the launching of an international, blind peer-reviewed journal published online twice a year by the OTW. The journal will be committed to publishing high-quality academic research as a way to document and analyze fan histories, cultures, and artifacts. Its first issue is slated for publication in September 2008.

Journal Committee:
Chair: Karen Hellekson
Kristina Busse
Cynthia W. Walker
Deborah Kaplan
Alexis Lothian
Cole J. Banning
Julie Levin Russo

The journal has been named Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC). The committee is in the process of appointing scholars to the journal's advisory and review boards. They plan to have a call for papers by February 2008.

Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at MIT, author of such works as Textual Poachers; Fans, Gamers and Bloggers; and Convergence Culture and member of TWC’s advisory board, says:

The field of Fan Studies has come of age: there are dozens of gifted young scholars from a range of different disciplines doing groundbreaking work in the field at the moment, each bringing their own distinctive theoretical and methodological perspectives to the topic, each connecting the study of fans to larger debates surrounding media and society. The time is ripe for a journal which will bring all of these researchers together and provide them with an intellectual home. And ideally that journal will come bottom up—from the community of fans and fan scholars. Given this context, Transformative Works and Cultures is a dream come true—an exciting chance to consolidate this field and at the same time, bridge the gap between fans and fan scholars.

TWC will publish articles about transformative works and related areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan communities, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and machinima. The journal invites a variety of critical approaches and encourages authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hyperlinked articles, or other forms that test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC’s aim is twofold: to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community, and to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics.

TWC plans a mix of traditional academic articles and shorter contributions in a Symposium section. We hope to solicit contributions from leading figures in the field, emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines, and theoretical-minded fans. Like OTW, TWC has an expanded notion of fair use. The publication permits the duplication of stills, and the journal will include the ability to embed video clips. TWC will be copyrighted under a Creative Commons license.

ETA: From the Journal Committee... The journal accepts four types of contributions: theory, practice, Symposium, and reviews. Theory is comprised of full-length research essays that are 6,000–9,000 words long. Essays in this section propose novel ideas that are placed within a coherent theoretical framework and add something new to the field.

Practice is comprised of 3,000–6,000 words long essays that apply a specific theory to a community; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate practice to theory within a theoretical framework. Theory and Practice essays are blind peer-reviewed by up to three reviewers, who are scholars in media studies, fan studies, English, communication, and related fields.

Symposium is named in homage to the fan-based collection of meta essays and in its spirit collects collects short, thematically contained essays. These 1,500-word essays provide insight into current events on any topic.

Reviews are of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies and include a description of the item's content, an evaluation of its importance in a larger context, and an assessment of the likely audience. Symposium essays and reviews will be editorially reviewed.

---femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Comments

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

There are other sites with threaded commenting, though -- Slashdot comes to mind. And isn't that part of old open-source LJ code anyway? You might be able to do a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste job into TW&C's site. I agree with you that it's easier to comment on-site, rather than keeping a tab open for LJ elsewhere.

Also, I'm incredibly tempted to submit one of my term papers, but it would be totally obvious who it was from and would thus eliminate the "blindness" factor, I think. On the other hand I loved what Henry had to say -- you're all right, the time is now, we have to make a go of it, so I might as well submit when it's ready. Provided you get that review board up, of course. :)

One more thing: if you're committed to fair use, does that mean I could Creative Commons-license my article and publish it elsewhere, if I was lucky enough to get it through your review board?

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

Fandrogyny,

why would it be obvious? Of course, if a peer reviewer were dedicated enough, they could google the title or ideas and possibly find the author like that, but I'm not sure most reviewers would go to that trouble :)

I'll let someone else take the CC question, but I'm pretty certain that most journals (including us) demand original material, so even if our license allowed you to do with your article as you please, I doubt you'd be able to publish it elsewhere.

[treewishes.livejournal.com]

Many journals allow you to republish other works and give you rights to publish elsewhere. It's primarily aimed at allowing authors to put papers on their websites, and also to allow republishing of figures and photographs without permission hassles. I mean, republishing anything in total is pretty counterproductive....

And this is why I won't publish anything in Elsevier anymore -- they are backwater idiots, imho...

[khellekson.livejournal.com]

One more thing: if you're committed to fair use, does that mean I could Creative Commons-license my article and publish it elsewhere, if I was lucky enough to get it through your review board?

Sorry, catching up late—the journal CCs the article, not so much you (in terms of the content being up on the org's Web site), but what that means is that you, or anyone else, can duplicate it if it is nonprofit.

Basically that means you can put it up on your Web site or copy it to your LJ once it appears in the journal. A scholar could reproduce it for her students in a coursepack. Another scholar doing meta could copy the article to some Web site she maintains. Etc.

If someone wanted it for an anthology, then that would be for profit, which the CC doesn't permit, and you'd have to grant special permission to let them do that.

We thought it provided the greatest amount of control and reuse over your own work while also permitting the free dissemination of ideas.

If you wanted to publish it elsewhere, certainly you could, but you'd have to of course divulge its previous appearance, and most publishers then won't want it (unless maybe in an anthology?).

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

In small fields, there is always a risk of a certain amount of non-blindness in so-called blind peer reviewing. As a rule, blind peer reviewers do their best to operate without assumptions about who's work is whose, and the editors do their best to match up papers with reviewers who are appropriate for the paper in question but who have the potential to be blind about the submitter. But in some fields, everybody knows that, Dr. X. is the only person working on, say, concealed questions as they appear in lolspeak, and that paper will never be truly blindly reviewed. The reviewers just do the most objective review they can.

That being said, keep in mind that the blind peer reviewers for the journal will be coming from a much larger pool of academics than the people in livejournal acafandom, so the obviousness of authorship maybe less clear than you fear.

ObDisclaimer: I am speaking here as an independent academic, not in my role for the journal. Both of the editors have spoken up already, and they are certainly the authoritative voice of speaking for the journal.

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

But you sound so much more authoritative than my "hey, it happens" :)

I haven't quite learned yet to match the proper LJ account with the proper speaking voice....

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

I keep being petrified that I'm going to speak as a fan from my professional identity and say something utterly inappropriate. Not that such a thing would be the end of the world, but I'm easily petrified by silly things.