Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Joe Deville: Mattering Press was founded by a group of early career academics who had become interested in the practices of scholarship we and our colleagues were involved in during our PhD.As we finished our PhD, we started to take our next steps into the world of publishing ourselves, including starting to think about book length forms of scholarship.At that point in time, there was no obvious place where you can publish book length, Open Access scholarship in the field of science and technology studies, which is the area in which we were working.So, in a somewhat implusive move, in retrospect, we decided that we should start our own press!We didn't really know much about many of debates around Open Access at that point, but we knew that we wanted scholarship to be available as easily as possible.I think that our deeper interest in the Open Access movement started with the decision to create that press.Then, of course, we've learned a lot more both in terms of how to be a publisher and in relation to Open Access.That's continued all the way up until the COPIM project, which is how I became involved in what would become the Open Book Collective.Q: That's really interesting.You have almost answered the next question, which was how did you come to found Mattering Press?Maybe you could tell a little bit more about the early stages of the process, what sort of hurdles you overcame and what your ambitions were at that time?JD:In terms of the the press itself, one of our ambitions was to publish open scholarship but there was a simpler reason why I wanted to create the publisher.This group of us had been providing each other with forms of support during our PhDs and we wanted to carry on working together.The press provided a nice way of us being able to do so.I think it's important to recognize those other motivations for wanting to get involved in publishing.The scholarship is important, but sometimes you just find a group of individuals that you like working and collaborating with.
Authors: Francesca Corazza, Judith Fathallah
Institutions: punctum books (United Sates), Lancaster University
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4295350817