Cultural Studies: Open Access Resources

Click here for the full slide show from the UW Libraries Open Access Week Exhibit 2011

Open access refers to providing information or documents “freely to the public via the internet.” Normally it also means permitting anyone to “...read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of...articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” (Budapest Open Access Initiative).

Why does this matter for Cultural Studies? An article by Ted Striphas (Associate Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at Indiana University), outlines some of the key questions:  "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing"  (published online on his Differences & Repetitions wiki, as well as in the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.)

Want to learn more? Please see some of the resources listed below:

Directory of Open Access Journals - The service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. As of October 2012, there are over 8000 journals in the directory and over 4000 journals are searchable at article level.

Open Humanities Press - includes both open access books and journals. Editorial board includes Lawrence Grossberg, Donna Haraway, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Directory of Open Access Books - Search or browse for books in cultural studies and related fields.

ACLS Humanities E-book collection - "a digital collection of nearly 3,700 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twenty learned societies, nearly 100 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access".

Cultural Analysis - "an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to investigating expressive and everyday culture. The journal features analytical research articles, but also includes notes, reviews, and cross-disciplinary responses."

Cultural Studies Review - open access, peer-reviewed publication: "This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge."

Culture Machine - " an international open-access journal of culture and theory, founded in 1999. Its aim is to be to cultural studies and cultural theory what fundamental research is to the natural sciences: open-ended, non-goal orientated, exploratory and experimental. All contributions to the journal are peer-reviewed."

CLCweb: Comparative Literature & Culture - Peer-reviewed, quarterly publication. The journal publishespublishes "new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as 'comparative cultural studies'."

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research - a peer-reviewed "academic journal for border-crossing cultural research, including cultural studies as well as other interdisciplinary and transnational currents."

Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture: "An e-book produced for the 10th anniversary of the research center at Virginia Tech, the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture".