Open Source Academic Publishing

Laura Vivanco.

There are plenty of open source academic journals (including JPRS, of course), and I've seen free repositories for dissertations etc, but I hadn't previously seen an open source academic publisher like ETC press. This may just be an indication of my ignorance, of course. Here's part of what ETC has to say about itself:

ETC Press is a publishing imprint with a twist. We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. We are an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

This year they've published a book written by the bloggers at the popular culture blog The Cultural Gutter. The book can be read in a variety of formats, most of which are free, and contains

10 articles each from science fiction/fantasy editor James Schellenberg, comics editor and publisher Carol Borden, romance editor Chris Szego, screen editor Ian Driscoll and founding editor and former games editor Jim Munroe.

Chris Szego's short articles on romance cover a variety of topics including Georgette Heyer, fairy tales, Mary Stewart, Nora Roberts, and the Smart Bitches' Beyond Heaving Bosoms.


The graphic is the Open Access logo, designed by the Public Library of Science, and downloaded from Wikipedia.