OLH to publish multi-lingual journal on Foucauldian research
Posted by Martin Paul Eve on 24 April 2017
We’re really pleased to announce that the OLH will be publishing the interdisciplinary journal, Le foucaldien, from Summer 2017. Based on the well-established foucaultblog, founded by humanities scholars at the University of Zurich in 2013, Le foucaldien is a peer-reviewed open access journal dedicated to research along the lines of the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault is credited with being “the author most frequently cited in the humanities” (by the peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), but his concepts are currently challenged in emerging fields such as media studies, digital humanities, post-colonialism, new materialism, and science and technology studies. Hence the main focus of Le foucaldien lies on updating and operationalizing Foucauldian approaches. In addition to extending the OLH’s publishing activities within philosophy, Le foucaldien offers readers “a truly interdisciplinary, multi-lingual, and transnational” journal, as one external reviewer of the journal’s application to join the OLH stated.
Dr Caroline Edwards, co-founder and Editorial Director of the OLH, said of the launch: “Le foucaldien was launched at the University of Zurich to make Foucauldian scholarship openly available and develop work in this area beyond the bounds of academic disciplines into a number of humanities subject areas. On the foucaultblog, the journal’s editors have already been successful in linking up academic research on Michel Foucault with work being done by activists and other practitioners. The journal shares our ethos and mission at OLH to help leading academic research find a wider audience both within, as well as outside of, traditional academia – and open access is the best way to do this.”
Professor Martin Paul Eve, co-founder and CEO of the OLH, added: “We’re so pleased to be taking on Le foucaldien. The journal’s commitment to multilingual scholarship (publishing articles in English, German, and French) offers an all-too-rare space for transnational discussion and is entirely in line with the OLH’s own commitment to multi-lingual publishing. Having translated the OLH site into French last year, in 2017 OLH’s journal Open Library of Humanities will be launching its German-language site and we have already assembled a strong team of German academic editors to support publishing in German. Accepting Le foucaldien onto OLH thus helps to further our expansion work in attracting financial support from partner institutions in France and Germany as well as encouraging further submissions from scholars outside of the Anglophone sphere.”
The journal’s editors Maurice Erb, Simon Ganahl, and Patrick Kilian emphasize: “The Open Library of Humanities is the perfect home for Le foucaldien because we strive to update both Foucauldian scholarship and academic publishing. So the journal’s name is a programme: not only research on Foucault, but rather along and even beyond his lines. And thanks to OLH’s non-commercial business model, neither the authors nor the public will have to pay for our peer-reviewed publications. This is exactly what Le foucaldien needs and where the humanities in general have to go in terms of disseminating knowledge.”
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.
Featured images by Ralf Appelt under a CC BY-NC-SA license and Darío Alvarez under a CC BY license.