Vision Statement – punctum books

"punctum books, founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and now incorporated in Santa Barbara, California as a public benefit corporation co-directed by Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, is a queer- and scholar-led, community-owned, and peer-reviewed open-access book (OA) publisher devoted to cultivating trans-disciplinary and genre-bending scholarly work that takes risks with content, form, and style. We foster authors both within and outside the Academy, including thought leaders at prestigious universities, early to mid-career researchers at a wide variety of academic institutions, precarious academics, independent scholars, artists, and others who want to push the boundaries of established disciplines and methodologies, who understand that where they publish is just as important as the content of their work, and who believe that sharing their work with the global commons is vital and necessary. punctum is further dedicated to publishing work that is not only trans-disciplinary in innovative ways but also helps to bring new fields of thought into being. We are also committed to supporting projects of translation and multilingualism across a wide variety of historical periods. Our commitments to and care for diversity, equity, and inclusion (often expressed but without meaningful follow up) are evidenced in our Directorship and staff, our catalog and also in or Editorial Advisory Board. Ultimately, punctum seeks and houses work that feels and thinks in the realm of “away from,” the grammar of the de-, that which deforms, decolonizes, deconstructs, defenestrates, demystifies, detoxifies, destabilizes, decenters, degentrifies, demythologizes, defers, detaches, defends, deletes, departs, decriminalizes, demobilizes, delocates, depolarizes, denationalizes, decalcifies, decommissions, delaminates, and delegitimizes.... punctum is an OA press, which means we not only have a moral obligation to grant to all of our readers free access to our titles, but that we also have an obligation to grant to our readers and authors, in the words of the 2003 “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,” “a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly, and to make and distribute derivative works [remixes and mashups], in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship,” and with the further understanding that the remixed works not be produced for commercial gain in any form whatsoever. But punctum feels strongly that this is not a robust enough definition of what OA should ideally mean, and we further believe that that the term “open access” should remain perpetually open for continual debate and ongoing re-definition, especially because the OA movement is now being thoroughly co-opted and marketized by behemoth for-profit publishers (e.g., Relx, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, SpringerNature, etc.), and they have made the term “Gold Open Access” not only hollow and ethically suspect, but also a deception, because authors and researchers, in many cases, have to pay very high fees for “Gold OA” publications. And many authors simply can’t pay, and those with more money in their research accounts don’t have to worry overmuch about their ability to publish in OA outlets. This means that inequity is built into the system of OA publishing. With some despair, we realize that Aaron Swartz’s and others’ idealistic belief that “information wants to be free” has gone largely unheeded in the neoliberal capture of everything as a commodity, even publicly-funded research. Which doesn’t mean that we can’t have an open commons free from neoliberalism, but rather, as Mackenzie Wark has written of the Situationists, we must imagine “a space of play in the interstitial spaces of the policing of the city via the dérive,” which means we “now have to imagine and experiment with emerging gaps and cracks in the gamespace that the commodity economy has become.” punctum works as much as it can within these gaps and cracks, and we also labor to heed Dave Ghamandi’s call, “Can scholarly publishing break from neoliberalism? We must find out through a collective struggle that fuses reflection and action.” ..."