New venues in STS

"It may be odd for the editor of a journal to promote the competition, but there is such a wealth of new opportunities for publishing research in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and on the other hand for learning from that research, that I want to recognize and point to some of these. That there has been a proliferation of new journals and similar publishing outlets speaks to the vitality and success of STS as a field. In theoretical terms, STS has been strikingly imaginative and productive: as a result of placing under scrutiny so many things normally taken for granted, the field is constantly creating new ideas, concepts and frameworks. In topical terms, the scope for the field is endless, because science, technology and medicine are everywhere in our world, and touch almost everything. All of the new venues I describe here are open access and are free of publishing fees, whether they are open-access journals, zines, multi-faceted blogs or video journals. In this, they are taking advantage of the relative ease of Internet publishing. They are also depending on a tremendous amount of work by volunteers, and in most cases the support of some institutional backers. My list is only partial, and only includes recent projects. There are, of course, a great many other journals in STS, such as those listed on the website of 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science (2015) ..."