Publishing

Why publish with us

In 2022, we held an interdisciplinary conference at Senate House, University of London. The event, On the Margins: Hypertext, Electronic Literature, Digital Humanities brought together academics at all stages in their careers to discuss the intersections between printed text and the digital, and to showcase work that explored and pushed beyond disciplinary boundaries. We believed that the papers showcased at On the Margins would produce an outstanding publication, but due to the diverse programme, we struggled to place our contributors’ proceedings with a traditional journal. We were too book history for digital humanities journals, too digital humanities for book history and literary studies journals, and not computer science enough for computing series. So for Text Affects, the progeny of On the Margins, the committee has decided to take matters into our own hands. 

We believe that access to publishing is essential to incubate and develop ideas. We believe that some traditional routes to publication privilege certain formats and genres, and that gatekeeping in traditional publication is damaging to academic freedom. 

We believe that academic rigour comes from being in dialogue with others and this is rarely done via academic publications but takes place during conferences, workshops and in discussions in the breaks. We consider that the low acceptance rates of some publications can be a bad proxy for quality and lead to conservative works that often reinforce trends and biases. 

Our approach of rigour and integrity

Our peer review process is not blind. You will know who your editors are and work with them to develop your ideas and publication. We will allow you to take the time you need to develop your idea. We believe that clarity of expression comes from clarity of ideas, not the other way around.

We will be filtering out proposals based on their relevance and novelty for the interdisciplinary approaches we embrace. In particular, we will be privileging innovative, novel proposals breaking new ground over proposals that present only incremental steps.

How to publish with us

We offer the chance to publish works that would not usually be published in standard journals, beginning with proceedings from the Text Affects conference, alongside longer-form opinions, visions, provocations, exploration of methodology, research designs and agendas, dialogues, discourses, and reports. We are open to interdisciplinary works and the online publication of non-traditional hypertext works. 

We specialise in interdisciplinary content, and we will provide respected peer reviewers from the community and beyond who are committed to developing a work to its fullest potential. Reviewers who are open to providing constructive feedback on authors’ thinking and ideas, and who will support the full life cycle from concept to open access publication. 

Text Affects is much more than a preprint: it is an online, open-access publication platform, peer-reviewed and supported by peers. We focus on what matters, which is the scholarship.

The main channel to publish with us is via the Text Affects conference. Ideas should be submitted in response to the conference call for papers. We aim to have a rolling opportunity to submit new proposals every year. If you wish to know about the next opportunity, get in touch with text-affects@open.ac.uk. 

All papers will be provided with a URI (like a DOI or OAI) indexed by scholarly search engines.

Types of publications

Conference proceedings form the main publication stream for Text Affects. However, we aim to follow the proceedings authors through a process of expanding their works into more substantial contributions. Authors of conference papers will be invited to consider working with peers from the community to act as editors to help further develop their work. The conference provides the platform and opportunity to pitch ideas and recruit expertise from our Editorial Board or the conference community. 

We support the following types of contributions and formats:

• Conference Proceedings 
• Pamphlet (around 20k words) about
  • Opinions
  • Visions 
  • Provocations
  • Methodologies
  • Research designs
  • Research agendas
  • Reports
• Interactive works
  • including a contextual statement 

Our Author Instructions include the page limits and templates with recommendations about expected structure for each type of contribution. We are open to considering other formats like minigraphs and collaborative volumes.

Editorial support

Text Affects is a mutual support community of peers, not a professional publisher. We support the development and incubation of ideas at different stages of maturity. 

What support we provide

The community provides peer review and editorial contributions to support authors in improving their research and its communication. This contribution is recognised through credits to the editors and their contributions to each work.

Authors will be invited to contribute to the community by volunteering as editors and supporting colleagues in this capacity.  

What we do not provide 

The community does not provide professional proofreading and copy editing. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of grammar and expression in their work.

Selection process

Proposals will be selected through the Text Affects peer review process. This process involves an expert and a lay reader. Selected contributions will be published as part of the conference proceedings.

Follow-up publications expanding conference contributions will instead be subject to an editorial review focused on the quality of the manuscript.

Publishing with Text Affects is an interactive process, wherein a timeline will be agreed upon between authors and editors based on their commitments. 

Copyright

All works are by default licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions. CC-BY licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. We recommend this licence for maximum dissemination and use of materials, but we will support other, more restrictive Creative Commons licenses of preference.