Aphra Behn Online: The Case for Early Modern Open-Access Publishing

An obvious and important advantage to the digital turn in early modern studies is the accessibility afforded by online academic publishing, but scholars of the Early Modern period (1500-1800) have been slower than their modern counterparts to take these opportunities seriously.¹ Though The Early Modern Commons now lists 305 blogs, and though many of our print journals have adopted a form of online presence, studies in the early modern period can claim roughly eleven peer-reviewed, open-access, online journals to date, including a large percentage of European-based, Spanish-language journals of interdisciplinary fields.² Given the current push to provide access to scholarly journals and given the financial pressures on print journals, the move toward online publication seems like a simple solution. So why is there apparent reluctance to do so? Perhaps the more conservative stance toward online publication among early modern scholars—who have studied the challenges of massive change resulting from print technology—points to underlying complexities.

The experience of the editors at ABO: An Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 supports this theory. ABO is an open-access (OA), peer-reviewed, online journal that first went live in March of 2011.³ Through the course of our first three years of publication, our understanding of what an online academic journal is and can be has radically changed, and the questions the editors at ABO have faced when establishing a new journal suggest a landscape of potential and uncertainty for early modern studies in OA publishing. Our story may be of interest in thinking about issues of vital importance at this moment.⁴

ABO is sponsored by the Aphra Behn Society, a small academic group committed to the study of fields related to Aphra Behn, namely women in the arts, 1640-1830. The society began in 1990 with the intention of holding an annual conference that challenged the standard, patriarchal way of organizing academic associations at the time. Like our namesake, the first woman to become a successful professional literary author, the society sought to contest the sexist hierarchies that structured our professional institutions. The meetings were focused on women authors and issues of gender. For the most part, the Aphra Behn Society downplayed the centrality of invited, plenary lectures, and it welcomed graduate students, creating opportunities, such as the annual essay prize, for graduate students to gain recognition. The alternative structure of the society fostered women's creativity and scholarship and emphasized mentoring and productivity among generations of scholars interested in women's work. Serious talk of starting a society journal began in 2007, and in view of the perceived crisis in academic publishing, we decided to create an online journal.⁵ The impulse was both financial and ideological. Unlike larger, more established academic associations for which subscriptions to bound journals supply needed income for their programs, our small academic society never felt a print journal would be sustainable. Moreover, the mission of the society, which involves breaking down barriers and creating discussion of women writers, artists and their concerns, seemed to fit naturally with OA practices.

When we began, we admittedly did not fully understand what it meant to create an online, OA, peer-reviewed journal. Launching a journal of any variety involves a tremendous startup and has a steep learning curve. We researched our professional standards through the Modern Language Association; we applied for an ISSN; we connected with the Directory for Open Access Journals (DOAJ); we joined the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ); and we established a credentialed and respected editorial board across disciplines that supported our mission. Drafting procedures and policies became, it seemed, a full-time occupation. We selected a timely theme for our first volume and sent out our call for submissions as widely as we could without a budget. Keeping with the innovative mission of the Aphra Behn Society, we created sections for the journal to emphasize pedagogical and professional issues alongside more conventional scholarly essays and reviews. We also created a section originally called Women on the Web to showcase the resources...