Article and rationale:
Jefferson D. Pooley (2016) Open Media Scholarship: The Case for Open Access in Media Studies. International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), Feature 6148–6164.
Larry Gross: The goal of IJoC has been to demonstrate that a true open access journal could succeed in meeting established criteria for success, which we have done: we are now ranked 3rd among Humanities journals and 6th among Communication journals by Google Scholar. The essential ingredient in our success was our ability to attract a world class editorial board and highly respected contributors from the start. This has enabled us to attract strong article submissions and to enlist the cooperation of the hundreds of peer reviewers whose unpaid labor makes the journal possible.
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Excerpt: Summary
This commentary, after outlining the broader rationale for open access in scholarly publishing, makes three arguments to support the claim that media and communication scholars should be at the forefront of the open access movement: (1) The topics that we write about are inescapably multimedia, so our publishing platforms should be capable—at the very least—of embedding the objects that we study; (2) media studies, owing to their fragmentation and marginality, can sidestep the prestige “penalty” that drags down other disciplines’ open access efforts; and (3) our rich research traditions on popular media dynamics are begging to be applied (and perhaps rethought) in the context of scholarly communication.