Reimagining the Book Stand: Virtual Platforms for Academic Publications

Researchers from the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University are reimagining the book stand to highlight the possibilities of open access publishing during the pandemic.

The ‘Virtual Book Stand’ has been developed to respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as modes of working, teaching and learning are being moved into online spaces. CPC researchers Samuel Moore and Janneke Adema, who co-organise the Radical Open Access Collective and are involved in the Scholarled Consortium, hope that the bookstand will inspire new modes of promoting publications virtually.

The Radical Open Access Collective is an international community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects, who promote visions for open publishing across the humanities and social sciences.

In 2018, Scholarled developed a collaborative book stand to cross-promote the publications of the presses within the consortium, highlighting the ideals and values that sustain their projects: open access, not-for-profit and scholar-led publishing, experimentation and an ethics of care. The consortium of open access publishers includes Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books.

This particular initiative hopes to offer an alternative to the promotion of publications at in-person events. Now that academic conferences are being rescheduled online, Adema and Moore have explored how to adapt the book stand online, imagining a virtual book stand that enables the sharing of new publications with attendees across the globe.

The virtual book stand was presented as part of a live Twitter thread during the Open Publishing Fest, a decentralized public event that took place online in May.

Visit the Virtual Book Stand and learn more about the project.