Today we'd like to shine a spotlight on Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), the OTW's international peer-reviewed academic online journal focused on media studies. In September, TWC will be publishing its 14th issue for its 5 year anniversary. A summary bibliography of all essays published by TWC can be found here on Fanlore, and a more comprehensive list of fan studies research is here on Zotero.

TWC's co-editors Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson kindly agreed to an interview about the journal's activities and goals, which you can read below the cut.

Who is behind TWC?

Our editorial team roster can be found here at TWC's Web site. We have a slate of volunteers who work on production, some of whom are OTW staffers in other contexts. We have volunteers who copyedit, HTML code/lay out the pages, and proofread.

For the journal itself, we have prominent scholars on the Editorial Board; scholars, grad students, and acafans who peer review; and book review and Symposium editors. Kristina works on the front end (solicitation, trafficking peer review) and Karen works on the back end (production-related stuff).

How do you get material for TWC issues?

We solicit all the time for all aspects of the journal. If we hear an interesting paper at a conference, meet an interesting person, or read an interesting blog post that we hope might get expanded, we e-mail the writer and ask her to consider submitting a piece. With the journal established after 5 years and 13 issues, we also get unsolicited essays. We also slate guest-edited special issues, which bring new readers and reviewers to the journal who may consider submitting.

Once an essay is submitted for the double-blind peer-reviewed sections (Praxis or Theory), we read through it to ensure it's appropriate for the journal and has a chance to make it through peer review. Sometimes we reject it at this point, but more often, we return it to the author with specific editorial suggestions for revision. If the essay is ready for double-blind peer review, we ask someone from our editorial board or someone in the field for a review. Once their reviews are submitted, we use these as a basis to either accept the essay, ask the author to revise, or reject it. An essay that has been accepted by two peer reviewers independently is accepted and sent into production.

Not all articles are double-blind peer reviewed. Interviews and most multimedia pieces are editorially reviewed; book reviews are reviewed by the review editor; and Symposium essays are reviewed by the Symposium editor and one or two internal reviewers.

TWC does not hold a backlog; all papers are published.

What's the production process like for a typical issue?

The production process, run by production editor Rrain Prior, begins 6 weeks before the publication date. First the essays are copyedited to our style (Chicago 16). The author reviews the copyedited file, and then the layout team tags the RTF file to HTML. This file is uploaded into our online publishing system, and galley pages are created by the software. These galley pages are read by the proofreader and again by the author. Karen also proofreads every issue. Rrain then inputs all the corrections at once. As a final step, Rrain assigns every document a unique DOI number and makes a DOI deposit (this ensures that the URLs will persist). Then the issue goes live.

A plug for our software: we use Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open source software that keeps track of absolutely everything for us, from submission to print. It's crucial to our process. The author uploads her paper into the system; the peer reviewers get their assigned papers from OJS and then type their responses into a field that OJS provides; OJS inserts the peer reviewer's remarks into the letter we write to the author; and the system logs all the e-mails. Every aspect of production happens through the system. It doesn't let you skip steps, and it honors the blind peer review process.

TWC ostensibly publishes twice a year, but you've published quite a few bonus third issues. Can you explain how these special issues come about?

TWC publishes a general issue every September. The other issues are special guest-edited issues that focus on narrow topics. For instance, we've published special issues on games (2009), fan activism (2012), and comics (2013), and forthcoming are issues on fan labor (2014) and performativity (2015).

These special issues are usually pitched by the special issue guest editor; there's info about this on our Web site so the guest editors know what they're in for, because they are in charge of solicitation, and they have to do quite a bit of peer review and other work.

We help the special issue guest editor write and disseminate the call for papers. Usually the deadline for receipt of articles is about a year before the issue is supposed to come out. During that year, the essays go through peer review and then into production. The special issue editor writes an introduction/editorial and may also participate in soliciting and reviewing the non-peer-reviewed items, such as interviews, multimedia, and Symposium, as well as suggest relevant books for review.

You're planning to release a fan fiction studies reader. Could you talk a bit about that?

For years, we have talked about the fact that fan studies is missing an actual reader—something that collects the essays that many of us repeatedly cite and reference. Worse, many of the essays are difficult to access—they are parts of monographs or essay collections, and some are long out of print. Two years ago, the University of Iowa Press started a fan studies line, and we proposed our reader. It's a reprint anthology and it includes essays by people such as Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, and Joanna Russ.

The Fan Fiction Studies Reader contains 11 essays in four sections, ranging from Fan Fiction and Literature to Fan Creativity and Performance. The essays are meant to provide a theoretical grounding so that readers can then continue with further essays in their area of interest, many of which are available online—for example, in TWC! We offer a general introduction on the history and state of the field as well as more specific introductions to the four sections, each of which covers the research in a specific field. The collection should be available by the end of the year, and all royalties will go to OTW.

When you're not working on TWC, what do you do professionally and fannishly?

Karen: I work full-time as a copyeditor in the scientific, technical, and medical market; mostly I edit medical journals and scholarly books. I present at scholarly conferences in the fields of fan studies and science fiction. This year I have given two talks about Doctor Who, one about the Big Finish audio alternate history Unbound line and another about fan-created Doctor Who vids that seek to recreate the missing eps. Alas, I've stepped back from fandom, in part because of TWC! It takes all the time and energy I formerly used writing fan fiction.

Kristina: I teach in the philosophy department at the University of South Alabama and raise two teenagers. I am in the early stages of a book for the University of Iowa Press on the ethics and aesthetics of fan fiction. I'm in a bit of a fannish return to lurking, because I can't write short enough for Twitter and miss the back and forth in comments on Tumblr. Instead I read a lot on AO3.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) today released issue No. 12, "Transnational Boys' Love Fan Studies," guest edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma, both of Oita University, Oita, Japan. This issue features academic articles on the growing interest in and engagement with Boys' Love (BL) within international fan communities. Following its regular format, this open-access online multimedia journal has collected scholarly essays, personal essays, and book reviews that seek to bridge fan and academic writers and readers. TWC is published under the umbrella of the nonprofit fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works.

Whereas BL fans have been studied in its original country of Japan as well as within the US American context, little has been published looking at other national responses and languages neither Japanese nor English. The editors, Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma, describe how personal encounters with transnational BL fans convinced them of “compelling necessity for BL critics to expand their own horizons” in order to acknowledge and study the “cross-cultural diversity of BL fan and community cultures that both globalization and localization propel.”

As a result, the contributions span countries and continents, moving between official products and fan versions, addressing the monetization of fan cultures and the pirating of commercial products alike. Björn-Ole Kamm and Paul M. Malone, for example, look at BL reception in Germany, whereas Erika Junhui Yi discusses Chinese BL writers. Lucy Hannah Glasspool and Toshio Miyake focus on the way Japanese culture gets constructed within international reception and translation. The remaining pieces focus on the possibilities of new venues for BL research, including character bots (Keiko Nishimura), the relationship between Yaoi and gay culture (Akiko Hori) and the controversial reception of Fujoshi within Japan (Midori Suzuki).

Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma are both at the Center for International Education and Research at Oita University. Nagaike has taught there since 2004 and focuses on analyzing female acts of fantasizing male-male eroticism in literature and popular culture; Suganuma joined the university in 2009 and studies the post-1945 encounter of Japanese and Western queer cultures. As such, both brought to the project an interest in the transnational elements of queer representations and male-male eroticism.

Founded in 2007, The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), is a nonprofit established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fan works and fan culture in its myriad forms. Advocating on behalf of fans, the OTW believes that fan works are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.

No. 13 is slated to be a special issue on "Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books," guest edited by Matthew Costello, and will appear June 15, 2013. The 14th issue of TWC will feature more general submissions and is scheduled for release on September 15, 2013.

The following was written by Journal Committee staffer Nele Noppe

Many readers of this blog will have heard of Aaron Swartz, a hacker and free culture activist whose suicide on January 13 sent shockwaves around the Internet. One of the many things Swartz campaigned for - in fact, the cause that got him in the most trouble in the end - was open access to academic research, a cause near and dear to the OTW in general and its Gold Open Access academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) in particular.

I want to take this sad opportunity to say a few words on what open access is and why it's so important for research on fans. Academics who research fans must do their utmost to make sure their work is available for everyone, particularly fans, the very group they're studying; and all fans should have the right to access to research on topics that are relevant to fandom.

What is Open Access?

Open access is the idea that academic research should be available for free to anyone who wants to read it. An open access academic journal makes its articles available online, entirely free for anyone to read. TWC is a good example of an open access journal. Open access publishing, although gaining traction, remains a departure from the traditional and still-dominant model of spreading the results of academic research, which is to publish papers in (expensive) print journals and locked online databases. That publishing system is becoming controversial among many academics, in part because it monetizes the content not to authors or scholarly organizations, but to the large publishers that negotiate and then retain control of access. Locking research away in expensive databases denies access to the many nonacademics who genuinely need information from academic research. Even information created through taxpayer-funded research, such as information funded by the US National Institutes of Health, is locked away, even though such articles are meant to be open access and cannot be copyrighted.

Let's take a hypothetical example of a fan worried about copyright, and the academic paper that could ease her concerns. (This example supposes that said fan doesn't ask for free advice from the OTW's friendly legal experts.)

Fan A has just been told that the GIF set she's posted is illegal. She's confused and wondering whether she should take her work down. Unbeknownst to her, publicly funded law researcher B has written a solid and well-thought-out journal article about copyright and GIF sets that says exactly what fan A needs to hear. How likely is it that the information from researcher B's research will make it to the person who needs it, fan A?

• First of all, and perhaps most importantly, fan A is unlikely to find out that the article even exists in the first place. The closed online databases that contain academic articles don't tend to show up much in search results from regular search engines. The specialized search engines and search techniques used to find content in academic works can be very handy if you know what you're looking for and where to look, but they're not very relevant to how many nonacademics try to find information.
• If fan A does find out about the article's existence and guesses from the title and abstract that it may be useful, she probably won't be able to gain access to the online academic database that houses it. Unless fan A happens to attend a university whose library had enough money to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to get access to that database, fan A's only option is to buy a download copy of the article. The cost for a single academic article of around thirty pages is often in the $20 to $45 range, and there may be no way to get a preview of the article to find out if it actually contains the information needed. Unless fan A is swimming in money and can afford to buy a couple of $20 articles in the hope of stumbling across what she wants, she won't pay this.

And that's where fan A's attempts to get anything useful out of academic research will probably end. Thousands of academic researchers do massive amounts of work on topics that are relevant to fans, but if that research is published in a closed journal, only other university-affiliated researchers, or people who physically go to a library that happens to subscribe to the relevant databases, can ever see it. Fans who may need the information are locked out.

Calls to action in memory of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was campaigning to change all this. He believed that information should be free. In January 2011, he used MIT's academic network to gain access to a huge academic database, JSTOR, and then used a script to download copies of eight million academic articles. It was an activist stunt, not an attempt to rob JSTOR of income, and JSTOR declined to press charges after Swartz gave them the copies he made. However, prosecutors still decided to charge him with thirteen separate felony counts related to the way he gained access to JSTOR's database. These felony counts could have ended up costing Swartz a fine of up to $1 million and decades in jail. His trial was due to begin in only a few months, but 2 years to the day after he was arrested for the JSTOR case, he killed himself. Many commentators claim that the threat of draconian punishment may have contributed to Swartz's decision to take his own life, and that the charges were mostly baseless regardless. No one was hurt; no money was lost.

The tragedy of Swartz's death has activists calling for reform of the Copyright Fraud and Abuse Act under which Swartz was charged, and the criminal justice system that threatened him with disproportionate punishment. One of the first and most conspicuous of these calls was made by academics on Twitter, who used the hashtag #pdftribute to post public copies of their papers that were first published in locked journals.

While actions like #pdftribute are admirable, they're not a sustainable solution to the access problem - and not just because we can't rely on every individual researcher to do this. Let's get back to fan A and her copyright worries for a second. What if researcher B becomes concerned about giving the public access to her research, and tweets a copy of her paper? Would that mean fan A can find what she needs?

Nope. The fact that a free PDF of an article is floating around somewhere doesn't mean that the information inside it becomes magically available to fan A. To point out just one obstacle: how is she even going to locate that file? Even if she managed to find out that researcher B's article exists, all fan A will find by searching is the paid version, with no indication that there's a free PDF around that she might find with a little more digging. Further, it's likely that researcher B doesn't have the legal right to distribute her paper, even though she wrote it: she signed over copyright to the journal it appeared in.

Long term solutions

To make a long story short, making research accessible isn't just about removing obscene price tags from academic articles. While the term "open access," used in its specific, legal sense, refers to journals that publish free copies of papers, making research truly accessible requires so much more than that. Open access is also about making sure that important research results are made available in a place where the people who need the information are likely to find it. (Imagine how much faster fan A could have found the info she needed if someone had mentioned researcher B's conclusions in, say, a relevant Wikipedia article!) Open access is also about making sure that people without experience decoding academic papers can still read and understand the information. Open access is also about making sure that the information is published in a format that people can reuse, and under a license that allows them to reuse it.

Improving access by fans to the academic research being done about them has been a key concern of the OTW from the very start. Since its founding in 2008, TWC has published no less than 200 articles, interviews, editorials, and book reviews (bibliography). Making sure that all this research is available for free online has taken tremendous effort; to get some idea, read this post by journal editor Karen Hellekson about the difficulties of running an online academic journal in an academic publishing system that doesn't value online content.

Fanhackers, Coming Soon

But just "free" is not accessible enough, and limiting our efforts to what happens within our own organization is no longer enough. That's why in a few weeks, we're launching a new project to expand our efforts toward making research truly useful and relevant beyond the borders and acafannish audience of TWC. We'll experiment with concrete ways to make research on fans more accessible and usable, encourage researchers to publish their work in an open way (no easy task when the closed print model carries prestige, which in turn can be used toward promotion and tenure), and give any support we can to other projects that share those goals.

In 2008, Aaron Swartz articulated the feelings of many when he wrote in his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" that keeping academic research behind pay walls is "a private theft of public culture" that should be resisted by all means necessary, especially by the researchers who can actually access all those locked papers. We call on all academics whose research is relevant for fans to make sure that their results can actually reach the people who need information.

Transformative Works and Culture Discusses the Impact of Fandom on Social Activism

NEW YORK, N.Y. (June 15, 2012)—_Transformative Works and Cultures_ (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) today released its tenth issue, "Transformative Works and Fan Activism." This issue is guest edited by media studies scholars Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova and features academic articles on the growing involvement of fan cultures and fandom on activism. Following its regular format, this open-access online multimedia journal has collected scholarly essays, personal essays, and book reviews that seek to bridge fan and academic writers and readers. TWC is published under the umbrella of the nonprofit fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works (http://transformativeworks.org/).

Co-editor Henry Jenkins argues, "One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel...Popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture." Jenkins's contribution discusses the idea of "cultural acupunture"; other essays discuss civic engagement via the Harry Potter Alliance; the German federal elections of 2009; the response to the Wisconsin legislature's stripping unions of collective bargaining rights; and affect and agency. Essays about specific fandoms address The X-Files, The Colbert Report,the Whedonverses, and Ho Denise Wan See. A central interest of many essays is the use of social media by organizations such as the Harry Potter Alliance, Invisible Children (whose Kony 2012 video recently went viral), and the Nerdfighters.

This large special issue emerges from work being done by the Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement Project (http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/) at the University of Southern California (Henry Jenkins, principal investigator).

Guest editor Henry Jenkins is a professor of communications and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. Formerly the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, he specializes in fan cultures and their effect on world making and franchise growth; his landmark book Textual Poachers remains a classic in the fan studies academic canon. Based on his studies on the evolution of popular culture and the processing of news information, Jenkins focuses on the transformation of the role of journalism in the digital age. His most recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, discusses the intersection of grassroots and corporate media, with examples of the transformative fan interactions in the worlds of Harry Potter and the Matrix.

Guest editor Sangita Shresthova is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer. She earned her doctorate from UC Los Angeles' Department of World Arts and Cultures and specializes in the globalization of Bollywood dance. Shresthova also manages Jenkins's new project on participatory culture and civic engagement.

Founded in 2007, The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), is a nonprofit established established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fan works and fan culture in its myriad forms. Advocating on behalf of fans, the OTW believes that fan works are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.

The 11th issue of TWC will feature more general submissions and is scheduled for release on September 15, 2012. No. 12 is slated to be a special issue on "Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies," guest edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma, and will appear on March 15, 2013. No. 13 is slated to be a special issue on "Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books," guest edited by Matthew Costello, and will appear June 15, 2013.