The Open Library of Humanities launches Theory and Social Inquiry

The Open Library of Humanities is very pleased to announce the launch of a new journal, Theory and Social Inquiry, on our in-house publishing platform Janeway. Theory and Social Inquiry is the successor of Theory and Society, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Springer Nature that covers theoretical analyses of social processes and phenomena. Theory and Society was founded in 1974 by sociologist Alvin Gouldner with the explicit aim of advancing scholarship devoted to the “critique and renewal” of established traditions of social theory and empirical research. His goal was to foster a better comparative-historical understanding of the social world and to address its entrenched structures and future possibilities. “Critique” and “renewal” also encapsulate the mission of the new journal, although the editors of Theory and Social Inquiry have given these concepts new meanings, alongside their original connotations.
 
Theory and Social Inquiry will be published by the Open Library of Humanities and will be open for submissions by July 2024. The journal will be academic owned and the new editorial team is primarily composed of former members of the Theory and Society editorial board, including: Nitsan Chorev (Brown University), Gil Eyal (Columbia University), Neil Gross (Colby College), Greta Krippner (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Charles Camic (Northwestern University), Mara Loveman (University of California, Berkeley), Chandra Mukerji (University of California, San Diego), Monica Prasad (Johns Hopkins University), David Swartz (Boston University) and Iván Szelenyi (Yale University [emeritus]). Thanks to the OLH’s diamond open access model (funded by an international network of more than 350 supporting libraries), Theory and Social Inquiry will be free to read and will not charge authors publication fees. 
 
OLH Executive Director Dr Caroline Edwards said: “I’m thrilled to be working with the former editorial team of Theory and Society. As scholars, we need to stand up to commercial publishers when they vandalise the academic integrity of journals, which have been carefully built up over decades by volunteer academic labour. The profit motive has no place in scholarly publishing. Theory and Social Inquiry has the full support of its academic community and will be a brilliant way to mark the 50th anniversary of Alvin Gouldner’s original vision for critical analysis within social scientific and humanistic research.”
 
T&SI editors commented: “We are excited to work with OLH in developing a new model of not-for-profit journal publication that respects the intellectual autonomy of scholars.”
 
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 33 journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors. 

If you like the work that the Open Library of Humanities is doing, please consider asking your institution to support us financially. We cannot operate without our library members. More details for libraries can be found on our signup page. 

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