Scholarly Association Journal to Launch on OLH

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new journal for Film, Television & Screen Studies in 2017. Open Screens: Journal of the British Association of Film, Television & Screen Studies has successfully applied to join the OLH platform and will launch in Summer 2017. Open Screens is a new society journal for the British Association of Film, Television & Screen Studies (BAFTSS), which was established in 2011 to promote the recognition of the discipline and represent the academic and professional interests of those engaged in it to the academy, government, funding agencies, the cultural industries and the public. Since launching, the Association has established a strong community that covers a disciplinary range, from the sociology of mass communications through media and cultural studies, area studies, to cinema and other screen studies. The journal will be “British” only by virtue of being produced by a British scholarly organisation: it will encourage submissions from any part of the world and from non-members.

Dr Caroline Edwards, co-founder and Editorial Director of the OLH, said of the launch: “We’re delighted to be launching Open Screens with the BAFTSS editorial team. As a born-digital journal, Open Screens will be able to make full use of our digital functionality at OLH, which supports all types of media such as embedded and interactive audio-visual content. Academic interest in Film, TV & Screen Studies has burgeoned in recent years, and these disciplines have a real opportunity in high-quality online publishing to extend the parameters and formats of their areas of study.”

Professor Martin Paul Eve, a co-founder and CEO of the OLH, added: “While much of our work at OLH is focused on flipping subscription journals, helping learned societies to embrace open access is also a core part of our mission and a worthy goal. Sometimes learned societies fear open access since they subsidise their activities through journal publishing – which essentially comes from library budgets. Yet the broadest dissemination of disciplinary material is at the centre of the missions of learned societies and we are thrilled to work with BAFTSS to achieve this.”

Dr Andrew Moor, Chair of BAFTSS, said: “We are excited to be working with the OLH, whose mission is reflected in the title of our new journal, Open Screens. BAFTSS encompasses a wide range of media, some of which have only recently developed. We are ‘open’ to these new technologies as well as more established media, ‘open’ to material from all cultures, ‘open’ to colleagues who work in these and other screen media globally, and ‘open’ in the sense that we subscribe entirely to open access, which allows our work to be more visible and impactful. We are delighted that the OLH is supporting us in our endeavours, and look forward to a long and productive relationship.”

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 Prof. Martin Paul Eve: martin.eve@openlibhums.org.

Featured image by Κέντρο Ελέγχου Τηλεοράσεων under a CC BY license.