Why Emory Authors Choose OA

Our goal in publishing A Silvan Tomkins Handbook open access is to make the book available to interdisciplinary, generalist, and international readerships. We anticipate that this book will be read and used not just by students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, but also by clinicians who work in contemporary psychodynamic models of treatment where the recognition and interpretation of affect has become a central concern; empirical researchers in disciplines like psychology or sociology who want to return to Tomkins’s theory of affect; and performance and arts practitioners who are curious about how a theory of affect could inform their work. An open access edition of the Handbook is vital if it is to circulate across these disciplinary boundaries, beyond the confines of the academy, and outside the borders of US publishing. We have designed this book to be used.

Spatial Revolution benefits from the open access publication model in three ways. First, the book reaches further geographically as a digital monograph, making it easily available to readers in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, the region that this history covers. With one click, the book is on the screen of a scholarly colleague halfway around the world who would have difficulty accessing a printed version. Second, because architectural history is a field that relies heavily on visual materials to make scholarly arguments, the photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams laced throughout Spatial Revolution are critical evidence inextricable from the text. Images in the open access version of the book are accompanied by alt-text, rendering the rich visual program legible for readers with visual impairments. Finally, we know that digitally accessible work travels more quickly and widely. I look forward to increasing curricular use of and scholarly feedback about Spatial Revolution because of its free availability.

We began this project [Uproarious] hoping to reach out to a larger audience across academic disciplines and to general interest readers. Our prose strives to be free of jargon as the book addresses a topic of heightened relevance at a time when a Twitter joke can shift the political climate overnight. But it is TOME that makes the hope of an extended reach a more likely reality.  Just as our claims are driven by popular culture, we think TOME helps us engage in global conversations. In an era with the fortunes of academics and educational institutions caught up in growing social inequality, we also hope that TOME allows our research to be more accessible not only to students at elite institutions but also to those who lack resources yet often drive the conversations on trending fields like humor.