Taylor & Francis

So, another update about my recent acceptance to Law & Literature, especially now that I've gone through their publishing agreement.

The journal itself, as I mentioned, seems like a good venue for me -- reputable editors, a very professional and rigorous peer review process, and strong articles in prior issues of the journal. But the  publishing agreement for Taylor & Francis (the publishing house for Law & Literature) also raised some . . . . let's call them worries, or at least questions, about accessibility. Exacerbating my worries, too, is the fact that I'm a humanities person. As far as academic publishing for the sciences and social sciences goes, I know very few good things about it, and it's quite strange for me to publish in a journal I've never actually consulted for my own research.

So, I did some googling. Here's what I found:
  • Subscription services for Taylor & Francis tend to be very expensive, and thus many libraries don't carry their journals . . . especially as these journals general lack the impact factor of Elvesier journals. That explains my own U of A library has only a selection of issues from Law & Literature.
  • Likewise, T & F has relatively few humanities journals . . . which means that humanities scholars rarely consult these articles for their own research. That also explains why I'd never encountered L&L before.
  • And, while T & F journals do permit gold open access publishing, you have to pay an APC of almost $3000. Most social scientists can simply use grant money for this, but obviously that doesn't apply to me.
Still, L & L is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, and I'm allowed to publish a postprint version of my article after an 18 month embargo. That partly alleviates issues of access. I'll also get 50 "free" online copies of my article to distribute to friends, colleagues, and whatnot. My enthusiasm, however, I admit is a bit dampened by all this . . . but still, given the previous publishing travails of my article, my hesitations aren't enough to make me seriously consider withdrawing the article. Also, I strongly believe in my ideas expressed by the piece, which helps. I'm just slightly less excited about the publication than before, is all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more