Body, Space & Technology to join OLH platform

Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 1 May 2017

We’re delighted to announce that Body, Space & Technology (BST), a leading journal of contemporary artistic practice and research, will be joining the OLH platform in Summer 2017. Since it launched in 2000, BST has built a strong reputation for scholarly quality and innovation, as well as fostering a global academic community around its published content. BST publishes research into artistic practice that engages with digital technologies, particularly as these relate to bodily interaction and creativity, and in multi-disciplinary perspectives. The journal attracts submissions from researchers across the arts and humanities, in fields as diverse as performance, theatre, physical theatre, fine art, art and design, architecture, music and sound, philosophy and aesthetics, digital creativity, ecology, ethics, cultural theory, critical theory, curatorial practice, bio-technology, neuroscience and computing.

Dr Caroline Edwards, co-founder and Editorial Director of the OLH, said of the launch: “We set up the Open Library of Humanities to foster interdisciplinary research that can make full use of digital technologies. Body, Space & Technology is a leading example of a humanities journal that has been doing this for nearly 20 years. The journal has the full backing of the scholarly community with many influential and important names actively involved in editing for, and publishing with, BST. It’s great to be able to secure a financially sustainable long-term home for the journal at OLH.”

Professor Martin Paul Eve, a co-founder and CEO of the OLH, added: “Body, Space & Technology was an early adopter of open access back in 2000 and has been publishing consistently high quality scholarship since then. There are considerable challenges in bringing many extant open access journals to a professionalised ecosystem with digital preservation, the correct metadata and migratable formats. In this case, we are pleased that our libraries chose to support this journal, which is key to a performance studies community.”

Professor Sue Broadhurst, Professor of Performance and Technology (Brunel University, London), and Barry Edwards, Artistic Director of performance company Optik – joint founding editors of Body, Space and Technology – are both thrilled that the journal is to join OLH. It is an opportunity to build on the journal’s achievements and current strengths and through the promotional power of the OLH platform to increase and diversify its readership. Throughout the journal’s many years of publication we have consistently maintained a policy of open access, free to both publish in and subscribe to. In this exciting new phase of its development BST will continue to pre-empt pre-determined framing of work and will maintain our tradition of open calls for submission that consciously resist the thematic categorisation of enquiry or practice.

The Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee.

Existing journals wishing to move to the platform should submit an initial enquiry to the Editorial Director, Dr Caroline Edwards at caroline.edwards@openlibhums.org. Libraries outside the US and UK interested in joining the OLH Library Partnership Subsidy model should contact Prof. Martin Paul Eve: martin.eve@openlibhums.org. UK-based libraries can join through Jisc Collections at http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/Index/2120. US-based libraries can join through LYRASIS at https://lyrasis.openlibhums.org. European libraries can join here: http://lps.openlibhums.org/ or send an enquiry to our European Library Partnership Manager: saskia.devries@openlibhums.org.