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

[khellekson.livejournal.com]

I discuss this in another comment here (http://community.livejournal.com/otw_news/12978.html?thread=475058#t475058). Not that I come to any conclusions!

The software we chose for the journal would permit un-peer-reviewed eLetters as you suggest (we need only create a category for this kind of text), but I think threading them to the article to facilitate discussion is better for what you have in mind, which is dialogue.

The scientific/medical journals I work with in my day job use Letters or Comments to deeply critique an article—its methodology or whatever—in some formal way. Authors are usually given a chance to respond to these, which are not attacks but scholarly differences of opinion. The reason they're published separately is because of the hugeness of their valid point, which may result in reinterpretation of the original study's results.

This kind of thing might be really interesting too, but that's what I initially thought of when I read your post re. "reader responses."

[slashpine.livejournal.com]

(Note, link is dead: goes to deleted first version of your comment?)

I love the kind of journal you're talking about. Like, maybe, PLoS? the Open-Access Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org/)

I adore both their principles and what they've done, and how creatively people can use it. Full disclosure: I use it for teaching, such as showing online environmental philosophy students new research on bonobos and baboons that shows that bullying and warfare are *not* our only genetic inheritance. Here's how NY teachers created a multimedia, multi-level lesson plan (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20040413tuesday.html?searchpv=learning_lessons) from The New York Times's article on how baboons stopped some bullies, and the PLoS-Biology articles it draws from.

That particular research is fandom-related, actually, as it compares our purported evolution for self-interest and combat to our equally strong, if overlooked, evolution for cooperation - which fandom's "gift economy" demonstrates. TV and film examples are even the lead-in for the Primer Essay accompanying the research article -- another great PLoS feature. (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020101)

PLoS Primer Essays would be the sort of thing I hope TWC might consider some parallel to. Somewhat like a good editor's introduction in a book, they are well-written background or overview/review pieces that accompany research and theory articles which might otherwise be so technical in language that they are inaccessible to most readers. Something like this could be very helpful in TWC for those who don't follow (or don't like) the typically dense lit-speak and cultural theory terminology beloved of fandom academics. (As an academic, I use dense idiom too, though the jargon in my field often can't help me penetrate the favored rhetoric and styles of aca-fan-scholars.)

Those 'overviews' or Primers would make TWC articles more usable to news media, as well. It's this feature, I suspect, that has made so much of PLoS's science the darling of newspaper science reporters. It's "pre-translated." ( Here they even blog about their betting on which new article the media will fan the most (http://www.plos.org/cms/node/292).

PLoS blogs, discussion and annotation features, ratings, and trackback make it more fun to use. (I notice, looking at it quickly, that their comments headers include "competing interests" as part of the poster info.)

The OA and good writing also leads to tens of thousands of downloads for some articles, like last week's "Nigersaurus" story. It was on NPR and TV, and all over the internet: PLoS found google links to 583 news reports and 1,855 blog posts (http://www.plos.org/cms/node/291). Now that's impact.

I haven't heard anyone loving the way their comment feature is structured to be separate from the article (http://www.plosone.org/annotation/getCommentary.action;jsessionid=244C680915EE2469702DA93DE3931A08?target=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001230), however.
They also have "Reader Response" (letters and replies) but it's separate from both the articles and the comments! (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&past_days=360)

Hopefully y'all will share some further details of the journal's online look and format soon. A PLoS editor has one interesting recap of their experiment so far online here (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020025).

[khellekson.livejournal.com]

[[(Note, link is dead: goes to deleted first version of your comment?)

Sorry, my bad, I messed something up and then ended up having to repost it, but alas after my two-nanosecond Edit Comment window had passed.]]

I love the kind of journal you're talking about. Like, maybe, PLoS?

In fact we are talking about a PLoS model, and thank you so much for noticing that. Woohoo!

Also, I really like your idea about some kind of introduction to the texts. We were planning to write editorials with each issue, and I think adding in contextualizing and background info to the essays might be really valuable, to sort of "meta" them into place so people understand why the research is relevant to a larger field.

We're hacking at the Web site but are currently plagued with pesky technical issues. We are DYING to release it, let me tell you, and we will totally announce it the moment it's finally, finally up.

We are using open-source journal software with a good rep in the industry, but we need the software to do so much more than simply index and present the articles and permit commenting. It also needs to permit trafficking of MSS through blind peer review, plus do a bunch of stuff related to layout.

Thanks for all your useful links—I'm totally checking them out.