Job Opening: Associate Editor | punctum books

punctum books is an independent, queer, and scholar-led Sparkly Diamond open-access publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design, publishing books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. Three primary concentrations for us are (1) books that shift the paradigm in established disciplines; (2) books that help to create emerging transdisciplinary fields; and (3) books that play in the fields of creatively speculative thought.

We are looking for a full-time US-based Associate Editor to join our staff. The primary job duty is to copyedit approximately 30–35 book manuscripts per year. Required skills and knowledge include:

PhD degree in the Humanities

2+ years experience copy editing scholarly manuscripts

Extensive familiarity with the Chicago Manual of Style

Excellent organizational skills

Expert verbal and written communication skills

As a queer press, we especially welcome applications from members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Salary and benefits include:

$45,000 to $55,000 per year

Healthcare

4 weeks vacation

10 holidays

Paid sick leave

Flexible, remote work

We welcome applications until August 1, 2023. Please send your cover letter and succinct CV to eileen@punctumbooks.com.

 

Book Bans Attack the LGBTQ+ Community, Open Access Is Part of Our Defense | punctum books

van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., & Joy, E. A. F. (2023). Book Bans Attack the LGBTQ+ Community, Open Access Is Part of Our Defense. Punctum Books. https://doi.org/10.21428/ae6a44a6.8634dbb0  

Fradenburg Joy & & van Gerven Oei (2023) What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Fradenburg Joy, E. A. & van Gerven Oei, V. W., (2023) “What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627

 

punctum books Releases 250 Open Access Titles on JSTOR – News – About JSTOR

“punctum books, an independent scholar- and queer-led open access publisher, and JSTOR recently released punctum’s entire backlist of 250 open access academic books on JSTOR. punctum books is dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry, publishing works that take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. They now have 360 open access books available on JSTOR. With these latest additions from punctum, JSTOR now includes over 10,000 open access books from 126 scholarly publishers….”

Punctum Books Helps Build Streamlined System for Archiving Open Access Monographs | Internet Archive Blogs

by Caralee Adams

Since its founding in 2011, punctum books has been an independent, scholar- and queerled open access (OA) press committed to reshaping the way knowledge production is shared in academia and beyond. 

Now, it is also a key player in the development of technology that’s making it easier for publishers to archive open access monographs. 

The idea behind the open access movement is that scholarly research is a public good that should be made available to everyone in order to remove some of the technological and financial barriers to research and to accelerate education and research across the planet. Open access monographs are long-form scholarly publications released in the public domain under a Creative Commons or comparable license, which allows readers to freely access them without paywall. Authors of open access publications retain the copyright to their work.

“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available,” said Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of the non-profit publisher, along with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy. “This is an ideological commitment — and, for us, this has been a guiding light in all our publishing work.” 

Recently, punctum published its entire catalogue of close to 400 books to the Internet Archive’s online collection. It includes books about queer studies, film and media studies, Anthropocene studies, recuperative work and titles dealing with the Medieval period.

[…]

 

 

Pratt and Punctum: A Program on Open Access and Climate Justice Tickets, Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 2:00 PM | Eventbrite

“Speakers include: Eileen Fradenburg Joy, Founder and Director of Punctum Books; Marina Zurkow, Multimedia Artist and Instructor at Tisch School of the Arts; Moderated by Matthew Garklavs, Electronic Resources Librarian at Pratt Institute Libraries. In observance of International Open Access Week, Pratt Institute Libraries is hosting a virtual event to showcase its partnership with Punctum Books. Since the theme for Open Access Week this year is “Climate Justice”, the program will explore how Open Access publishers like Punctum serve as good platforms for sharing knowledge and expressing ideas on this timely topic….”

A Vision Statement for Thinking, Writing, and Publishing Otherwise in the University without Condition | punctum books

punctum books, founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and now incorporated in Santa Barbara, California as a public benefit corporation co-directed by Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, is a queer- and scholar-led, community-owned, and peer-reviewed open-access book publisher devoted to cultivating trans-disciplinary and genre-bending scholarly work that takes risks with form and style. We foster authors both within and outside the Academy, including thought leaders at prestigious universities, early to mid-career researchers at a wide variety of academic institutions, precarious academics, independent scholars, artists, and others who want to push the boundaries of established disciplines and methodologies, who understand that where they publish is just as important as the content of their work, and who believe that sharing their work with the global commons is vital and necessary. punctum is further dedicated to publishing work that is not only trans-disciplinary in innovative ways (digital poetics, imaginary materialisms, theory-memoir, counterfactual film history, and meme studies, for example), but that also helps to bring new fields of thought into being (such as exoanthropology, cognitive museum studies, anthropocene studies, speculative musicology, soft architectures, object-oriented ontology, fan theory, queer literary forensics, and more). We are also committed to supporting projects of translation and multilingualism across a wide variety of historical periods. punctum seeks and houses work that feels and thinks in the realm of “away from,” the grammar of the de-, that which deforms, decolonizes, deconstructs, defenestrates, demystifies, detoxifies, destabilizes, decenters, degentrifies, demythologizes, defers, detaches, defends, decriminalizes, demobilizes, delocates, depolarizes, denationalizes, decalcifies, decommissions, delaminates, and delegitimizes.

 

Scholar-led Open Access Publishers Are Not “Author-Chutes” · punctum books

“Both Open Book Publishers (OBP) and punctum books recently shared publicly that their per-title cost for high-quality open access monographs hovers somewhere around the $6,000 mark. This number is markedly different from the findings of the the 2016 Ithaka report “The Costs of Publishing Monographs,” which found that open access monographs published by university presses cost between $30,000 and $50,000.

As both institutional libraries and funding bodies invested in a transition to a fully open access scholarly communications landscape are naturally seeking how best to spend their money in the public interest, it comes as no surprise that the disclosure of our numbers, and accompanying financial transparency, has elicited diverse responses from the scholarly publishing world….

Rather, we invite university publishers to transparently disclose their financial records, so that we can level the playing field and have a discussion on what is really important: how we can help the entire scholarly communications landscape to transition to a sustainably open and cost-efficient access model, with the freedom to read, write, edit, and publish, and where public knowledge is truly accessible to the public.”