Open with Purpose: Open Access Week 2020
Permanent link for Open With Purpose: How can Open Access publishing enable more inclusive scholarly conversations? on October 19, 2020
Hello on this first day of Open Access Week – Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion. Each day this week we will be profiling open access collections and library publishing services here at Grand Valley State University, focusing on how they foster equity and inclusion. Our first profile is one of our newer open access journals, Ought. The editor of the journal, Robert Rozema, describes the journal’s mission and why OA is so important to its success.
“Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture focuses on autistic culture, aiming to document autistic culture by publishing scholarly and creative works that examine and explore it. As such Ought is ideally suited for an open-access platform. To begin, Ought wants to reach both academic and non-academic audiences—and this includes autistic and neurotypicals, professors and teachers, poets and painters, and people who are interested in autism and autistic culture. The journal also blends popular and scholarly genres, including visual artwork, videos and animations, and other genres/mediums ideally suited for digital, open-access delivery. In the upcoming issue (Fall 2020), the journal will publish a scholarly analysis of the work of Gary Numan, an autistic musician who composed influential electronic music, some of which will be included in the EPUB version of the article. The same issue will also feature a short film by a non-verbal autistic teenager and visual work by a frequent contributor The Art of Autism.
Because these works will be readily available—and not sealed off in an expensive database—they will be accessed by a much wider range of readers/listeners/viewers. Open access also means that the journal can integrate readily with social media platforms, increasing traffic and readership to the journal. My recent article on autistic superheroes, for example, was mentioned on Twitter and has received nearly 500 downloads to date, far more attention than my usual scholarly articles would garner. Open access makes all of this possible.”
Read more from Ought on their website.
