Medieval History

Year's Work in Medievalism Goes Open Access and Moves to Georgia Tech

Dear colleagues,

The Year's Work in Medievalism has a checkered history. Originally conceived as a publication that would accompany our annual medievalism conferences as a proceedings outlet as well as a place for annual summaries of scholarship, bibliographies, and reviews, only about half of the planned volumes ever saw the (printed) light of day. Lack of financial support and too much fluctuation among the annual conference organizers/editors rendered production difficult. This changed when the indefatigable Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State) took over general editorship. Since then, YWiM has appeared regularly, published with Wipf & Stock in Eugene, OR. Since 2011, E.L. Risden (St. Norbert) has continued on Gwen's successful path.

Over the years, the central issue with YWiM has been the distribution beyond the members of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Even since 1999, when high editorial standards (including blind peer review) and a regular annual publication schedule considerably raised the journal's profile, many a great essay has remained relatively invisible due to low print runs and the absence of library subscriptions. Today all of this will change: Thanks to the sponsorship of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the Library at the Georgia Institute of Technology, YWiM will now appear electronically and with full open access to a global readership. In order to make this new arrangement manageable, I am joining Ed Risden as on-site co-editor.

When you visit our no-nonsense site, you will notice that we are using open source software developed by the Public Knowledge Project's "Open Journal Systems." PKP is a multi-university initiative developing free open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. We are grateful for their work which, we believe, will help many other journals make the transition to open access. The new site offers an efficient work flow for authors who would like to submit new work for consideration for publication, for our peer reviewers who can provide us with their evaluations within the system, and for all members of the editorial and publication process. Please know that you can sign up and create an account profile in YWiM if you are willing to serve as peer reviewer or want to receive a notification when the next issue is published. Not all pages of the journal have yet been fully "populated," so don't be surprised if you encounter sections that still need attention (the abstracts for the essays aren't up yet, for example). We are doing our best to remedy that over the next few months.

In keeping with our wholehearted support for the PKP's policies and the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative, authors publishing with YWiM retain copyright for their contributions and agree that they may be made available to a global audience by the Georgia Institute of Technology under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This license stipulates that readers/users must: attribute the essay, may not use the essay for commercial purposes, and may not alter, transform, or build upon the essay.

Enough preliminary matter:

Here is the LINK to volume 27 (2012) of The Year's Work in Medievalism, expertly brought together by Ed Risden.

I would like to thank Ed for his collegial collaboration during our move to an electronic venue. I would also like to acknowledge the steadfast support by our IT specialists in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and by our colleagues at the Georgia Tech Library, most of all Fred Rascoe, without whose patient guidance the publication would not have been ready for primetime, i.e., today, the first day of the 28th International Conference on Medievalism at St. Norbert College.

Volume 27 contains nine wonderful original essays which, because they will be broadly accessible, are bound to find numerous interested readers worldwide. Enjoy, and consider submitting your own work to YWiM. What we need each of you to do at this point is to link your own websites to our new URL, encourage your libraries to add it to their lists of open access journals, and to tweet and facebook the good news to all your professional networks.

Best,

Richard

- Briefly Noted -- Accessus: A Journal Of Premodern Literature And New Media
Readers of Modern Medieval will want to go take a look at the inaugural issue of Accessus, a publication of the Gower Project. This excellent-looking first issue includes the following essays that bring together disability studies, medieval studies, manuscript...

- A Happy New Year's Work In Medievalism
Dear colleagues in Medievalism Studies, The checkered story of The Year's Work in Medievalism continues, but we are getting better at making our colleagues' scholarship on medievalism more generally accessible. As you may remember,...

- Creating The Future Lexicon Of Medievalism Studies
For all those interested in the deliberations that preceded the publication (in October) of Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, here is a link to Richard Utz's summary, published in Perspicuitas, an open-access journal published by the...

- Medievalism Now Forthcoming
We are happy to announce a special issue of The Year's Work in Medievalism forthcoming in May. Entitled Medievalism NOW, and edited by Karl Fugelso, E. L. Risden, and Richard Utz, it will be available online and with full open access...

- Call For Papers: Ethics And Medievalism
Studies in Medievalism, a peer-reviewed print and on-line publication, seeks 3,000-word essays discussing ethics in medievalism. What role do ethics play in post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages? In interpretations of those responses? ...

Medieval History