Transformative Works and Cultures (Tieteellinen julkaisu)

Because Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a multimedia journal that publishes screen shots, embeds videos, and uses hyperlinks, the journal must appear online. PDFs are unable to adequately duplicate the interactive experience of the journal.

Further, because TWC copyrights under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License, fans may wish to transform the journal by creating PDFs of content and making it generally available. As long as the document provides the URLs of the original source, and as long as the poster does not charge money, this activity is perfectly acceptable under the terms of the CC license. In fact, TWC encourages such transformative fan activity.

Finally, TWC is bucking the importance the academy places on print media. If we created official PDFs, these documents, not the online versions, would be treated as authoritative merely because of the privilege print is provided in the academic publishing industry—and yet the PDF will always be a second-rate static snapshot of an interactive document.

The journal retaining copyright is standard in academic journal publishing. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is thus in line with general practice.

Production editors at presses seeking reprint permission will automatically come to TWC, not the author. Requesting payment for reprints is one way that academic journals make money. However, TWC, because it is associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization, and because we want to retain the spirit of open access, will never ask for money to reprint articles.

Our main reason is a purely practical one: TWC retains copyright to protect its ability to grant reprint permission in case the author disappears.

Further, we are committed to open access. If we released copyright to the author, the author could choose to abrogate that by refusing to grant reprint permission. This is not in line with TWC’s mission and goals, which are focused on the free dissemination of ideas.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Anyone is free to reprint or remix, with attribution, anything in TWC without obtaining specific permission, as long as the original publication information is attributed and/or hyperlinked back. This means that anybody can post full text of the articles, with attribution, as long as no money is made. Authors may therefore repost full content to their blog or Web site after TWC has been published. Likewise, random people can repost full text without restriction. As long as they attribute it properly, such duplication is fine.

If people want to make money off the text, perhaps by anthologizing the essay in an edited volume, then they must ask. This includes the author, because once an article appears in TWC, TWC owns the copyright.

TWC grants permission to anyone who requests reprint, regardless of who they are (the author or not), without asking for money. We do this in the spirit of open access. We require that the editors be asked for for-profit reprinting because we will take the responsibility of tracking down and informing the author.

Transformative Works and Cultures prints peer-reviewed academic articles about transformation, broadly conceived, about fan engagement with various sorts of texts, and about fan communities; editorially reviewed meta articles and personal essays; book reviews; and interviews.

Detailed online submission guidelines are available at the Transformative Works and Cultures website.

We welcome submissions from everyone as long as the contribution complies with Transformative Works and Cultures's focus and scope.

Transformative Works and Cultures comes out twice a year, on March 15 and September 15.

The journal is meant to provide a space for academic analysis of individual transformative works and the larger culture of fandom from which they come, helping to demonstrate the social, educational, and aesthetic value of fandom and fannish works.

A successful journal will also help fans who happen to be interested in engaging in fandom in a more theoretical and academic way to share their scholarship more widely, improving communication between fans and academia, as well as provide a theoretical background for OTW's mission of explaining and preserving fandom and transformative fanworks. The journal will also explain the context of particular works to help establish fanworks as creative art in their own right.