APPOSITIONS at Work: Reflections on Open-Access Publishing

This essay concerns contributions to the field since 2008 from the peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed, EBSCO-distributed e-journal, APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture (http://appositions.blogspot.com), of which I am the founding editor.¹ APPOSITIONS is an open-access, annual, independently managed journal that aims to build bridges among different communities: Renaissance scholars and early modernists; literary and cultural critics; university/college faculty and independent scholars; and disparate academic societies.² Print journals reach those audiences as well, of course, but e-journals can build their communities in ways that were not possible before the digital age. APPOSITIONS publishes under a Creative Commons license, which may be negotiated for various outcomes (including hard copy reprints).³

APPOSITIONS cultivates a vigorous blending of traditional and innovative forms of scholarship. Our work turns upon generative contradictions. We are both outside of established institutional hierarchies of process and production (we are online in the form of a blog), and we are the epitome of such systems (we are peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed, and EBSCO-distributed). Such dedication to both/and, such inclusion of opposition, is required by our project of apposition. The journal's title embodies these principles, which we underscore in our sidebar with the Oxford English Dictionary's various definitions for apposition, all of which emerge from the early modern era, c. 1550-1850.⁴

APPOSITIONS launched in 2008 as an electronic conference and journal. We continued to operate on both of those tracks until 2011, when we temporarily discontinued the e-conference. The e-conferences were successful (though laborious); they provided dynamic spaces for papers, dialogue, and special events that tapped cutting-edge topics, such as the politics and practices of book reviewing in e-journals.⁵ Our e-conferences (held from 2008 to 2010) hosted a total of twenty-nine papers and five events; our platform was visited thousands of times by scholars around the globe, and fifty-two moderated comments were posted. Each of our e-conferences ran for approximately one month, after which time the papers were removed. Programs, abstracts, special events, and our participants' comments remain live on the website.

APPOSITIONS, the journal, has published five volumes, each addressing a theme: "Genres and Cultures" (2008); "Dialogues and Exchanges" (2009); "Digital Archives" (2010); "Texts and Contexts" (2011); and "Artefacts" (2012). Those volumes altogether include thirty-four articles, eighteen book reviews, and one interview. All of those works, including the reviews, underwent our standard peer review process. Volume 6 (currently in-production) concerns "Editions and Editing." Since the release of Volume 1 (2008), our site has registered over 500,000 hits (which, of course, break down into highly specific terms that we obtain from Google Analytics).⁶ We have thus far received ninety-five submissions for peer review, of which fifty-three have been published. Our authors represent a wide range of professional appointments and career paths: senior and junior scholars, contingent faculty, independent researchers, and doctoral students. Many of our authors have successfully completed their tenure and promotion cases by highlighting their publications in e-journals such as ours.

Having already received sponsorship from the University of Denver's Penrose Library and then, in 2009, ISSN registration with the Library of Congress, APPOSITIONS was soon thereafter catalogued by indexing services, such as Duotrope, Modern Language Association, Open J-Gate, and World-Cat (among others). After two successful years of our work, EBSCO offered APPOSITIONS a distribution contract, which now provides global access to our articles and book reviews. At no additional cost to their subscribers, EBSCO bundles our annual volumes into suites of information services. Some hypertext documents, wiki-enabled works, and other WYSIWYG features specific to our platform are not submitted to EBSCO and thus remain live with APPOSITIONS at our site.⁷

We have accomplished all of these things with a relatively small and dedicated editorial team of sixteen colleagues and with an operating budget of zero.⁸ When I began developing APPOSITIONS in 2005, I had much to learn. The journal certainly would not have reached our current level of achievement...