The Affordances of Open Access in the Age of Online Scholarship
peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-01-01
Summary:
"Welcome to the very first fully Open Access issue of the Media Education Research Journal. Articles are now available for anyone to read, free of charge, and in perpetuity with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). There are no Article Processing Charges (APCs) either, so authors (or their institutions) do not need to pay to publish. This pivot to Open Access (OA) came at a time when there were lots of other ‘pivots’ occurring – not least the one to online learning during the pandemic. The pandemic was not a direct contributory factor to MERJ’s change in status, but (without ignoring the crisis and misery it precipitated) it did create a sense of possibility – it forced us to explore the affordances of the online world and, subsequently, has encouraged us to address the function and purpose of particular activities, acknowledging that some are not worse, and may even be better, online. MERJ has been, until this point, a print-only publication, which has meant that the scholarship within it has only been accessible to those with a subscription and access to a physical copy. The accompanying website (merj.info) functioned as a ‘shop window’ for the print publication, but now its potential as a publishing platform is being fully utilised. The shift online was made possible by a change in the ownership of its publisher, and credit should be given to Auteur Publishing (now an imprint of Liverpool University Press) for nurturing the journal since its inception in 2010...."