The academy needs open-access. As Bethany Nowviskie has pointed out in a memorable (and revolting) phrase, much of the intellectual product of the academy is “fight club soap.” We produce scholarly work at great cost to our institutions and the donors and governments that fund them, only to hand them over to for-profit publishers, who sell them back to our libraries at ruinous cost. This cost is exorbitant for the wealthiest universities and prohibitive for everyone else, exacerbating the divide between haves and have-nots, and locking our scholarly work behind paywalls where hardly anyone reads it.

Thankfully, there is no reason why we need to continue in this way. The economics of publishing that favored the printed, bound, and distributed academic journal are now untenable, and instead we have the opportunity though the internet for open-access publications, that is, publications which are available online, for free, regardless of the user’s affiliation. Open-access scholarly publications are the academy’s chance to cash in on the idea that “information wants only to be free.” But like anything worth doing, creating open-acccess publications will take a lot of work.

My session proposal, then, combines both the large question of open-access with the specific issues I’m going to face over the next year or so. I’d like to talk with scholars, librarians, technologists (anyone, actually) about the best practices and new ideas for open-access publications. For example, we might try answering these types of questions:

• What new ways of publishing can an online, OA journal take advantage of?
• What are the technical requirements of an OA journal?
• What is the best use of web 2.0 technologies?
• Is there a better way to handle citations than footnotes?
• How can an OA journal keep its back catalog useable into the future?
• What are the best software options for running an OA journal?

It would be best if this session could produce a deliverable, probably in the form of a report or syllabus listing best practices, useful readings, and possible future directions for open-access journals. We could write this collaboratively during the time we have for the session. I also have the code for the Journal of Southern Religion available on GitHub, if anyone wants to hack around with it, though I’ve proposed a separate hacking session for a particular problem involving e-books.

If you have any ideas, links to open-access publications that are doing good work, or readings that would helpful, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

N.B. This is a revision of a session proposal from last year’s THATCamp New England, but I still think this question is worth talking about.

Pandoc is a utility written by philosopher John MacFarlane for converting files from one markup format to another. For example, you might write a document in a plain text format then convert it to HTML. I’ll be giving an introduction to Pandoc and Markdown in Saturday’s plain-text workshop. But for this unconference session, I’d like to propose a hacking session that will create some software to solve a problem using Pandoc.

If we have some people who know LaTeX, I propose that we create a Pandoc template to meet the requirements of the standard academic paper that undergraduates have to hand in. While the standard Pandoc templates are great, the general expectation for academic drafts are that they will look like a Turabian or MLA paper, so let’s make a template for that purpose.

If we have some people who know Ruby  or shell scripting, I propose that we figure out a way to make EPUB books from the files for a blog or website published using Jekyll. This might take the form of a Jekyll plugin written in Ruby, like Anthologize but for Jekyll, or a shell script that stands outside of Jekyll. I’m interested in generating EPUBs for each issue of a journal (code here), so I have a real world example we can hack.

By the end of the session we will have made a small but complete product to launch into the world.