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, 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, 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….”
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.
[…]
We are thrilled to announce the launch today of the Open Book Collective! Visit our site to see our members such as Open Book Publishers, the Directory of Open Acccess Books (DOAB), OAPEN, punctum books, mediastudies.press, meson press, Mattering Press, African Minds, and Thoth.
Librarians can see Open Access initiatives, presses & open infrastructure projects, that can be supported via annual memberships that will help these groups to thrive & also contribute to a fund to assist these groups in further developing & bettering their operations.
Supporting members of the OBC contribute to a more durable ecosystem for the long-term sustainability of OA publishers & open infrastructure developers so critical to Bibliodiversity.
Open Book Collective has been developed by the COPIM project and ScholarLed, generously funded by the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (grant number 4192).
Visit our website here: http://openbookcollective.org and send any questions or comments to us at: info@openbookcollective.org
“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….”
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.
punctum books has signed the Metadata2020 metadata pledge. By signing the pledge, punctum books promises to be “an advocate for richer, connected, and reusable open metadata.”
Over the last few months, punctum has already acted upon this promise by making its metadata openly available under a CC-0 licence through open metadata dissemination platform Thoth, which it is currently beta-testing. You can read more about the development of Thoth by the COPIM project here and here.
“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.”